On Searle (On Austin) On Language: Kanavillil Rajagopalan

Language & Communication 20 (2000) 347±391
www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
On Searle [on Austin] on language

Kanavillil Rajagopalan
Department of Linguistics, Institute for Language Studies, State University at Campinas
(UNICAMP), Campinas Ð SP, 13081-970, Brazil
Keywords: Speech act theory; Austin; Searle; Academic philosophy; Sociology of knowledge
[O]ne of the reasons why the subject of speech acts is so much fun is that you
don't have to worry about what all the great ®gures from the past said, because
most of the great philosophers had no theory of speech acts.
John R. Searle (quoted in Nerlich and Clarke, 1994, p. 440)
1. The problem
In a very stimulating and neatly argued paper entitled Òn Searle on language',
published in Language & Communication, Nigel Love (1999) points out a profoundly
contradictory state of aairs besetting the Theory of Speech Acts, in the form in
which it has been developed and defended by John R. Searle (passim±-but especially,
Searle, 1969, 1979a) over the last three decades or so. The contradiction Ð or what
may be characterised, at the very least, as a permanent tension Ð in Searle's version
of the theory has to do with the attempt by the Berkeley philosopher to reconcile
two trends which, as Love reminds us, are at bottom irreconcilable.
On the one hand, Searle has insisted right from the beginning that the funda-
mental concept that his theory invokes is not that of any of the familiar units of
language, as identi®ed by the grammarian. He says:
The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the
symbol, word or sentence, or even the token of the symbol, word, or sentence,
E-mail address: rajan@panini.iel.unicamp.br (K. Rajagopalan).
0271-5309/00/$ - see front matter # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S0271-5309(00)00007-0
348 K. Rajagopalan / Language & Communication 20 (2000) 347±391
but rather the production or issuance of the symbol or word or sentence in the
performance of the speech act (Searle, 1969, p.16)
For Searle, thus, a theory of language is not a theory about the combinatorial
possibilities of symbols that can be strung together so as to yield the well-formed
sentences of a given language Ð as a Chomskyan generative grammarian claims it
should be. It is about the knowledge that the native speakers of a language have of
what speech acts are performed during actual communicative events as opposed to
what sort of knowledge the speakers must possess in order to, say, be able to tell all
and only the grammatical sentences of their language. Says he:
It might be objected to this approach that such a study deals only with the point
of intersection of a theory of language and a theory of action. But my reply to
that would be that if my conception of language is correct, a theory of language
is part of a theory of action, simply because speaking is a rule-governed form of
behavior. Now, being rule-governed, it has formal features which admit of
independent study. But a study purely of those formal features, without a study
of their role in speech acts, would be like a formal study of the currency and
credit systems of economies without a study of the role of currency and credit in
economic transactions (Searle, 1969, p. 17).
To summarise this point, then, Searle has taken pains to stress that (his own ver-
sion of) the theory of speech acts is at odds with the grammarian's or, for that
matter, the modern linguist's, approach to language in at least one crucial respect.
On the other hand, Searle has also been equally anxious Ð again right from the
very beginning of his career Ð to impress upon the academic community that his
approach to communication and that of the traditional grammarians (or, more
contemporaneously, the linguists, especially, of a Chomskyan or `generative' per-
suasion) ``construed not as theories but as approaches to investigation, are com-
plementary and not competing'' (Searle, 1969, pp. 18±19). Or, as he puts it
elsewhere,
I don't think that [the Chomskyan view of language, according to which the
task of linguistics is to specify the set of rules that relate sounds and meanings]
is false, so much as it is extremely misleading and misleading in ways which
have had unfortunate consequences for research. A more accurate picture
seems to me this. The purpose of language is communication. The unit of
human communication in language is the speech act, of the type called illocu-
tionary act. The problem (at least one important problem) of the theory of
language is to describe how we get from the sounds to the illocutionary acts
(Searle, 1979b, p. 178).
Nevertheless, on other occasions, Searle adopts a tactic that is sharply critical of

Chomsky, especially in what he sees as the latter's obdurate refusal to see the `per-
fect ®t' between their respective approaches, or rather a smooth passage from the
K. Rajagopalan / Language & Communication 20 (2000) 347±391 349
one to the other. Thus Searle accuses Chomsky of ``the failure to see the essential
connection between language and communication, between meaning and speech
acts'' and of engaging in `à rearguard action'' against the study of speech acts
(Searle, 1974, p. 30).
Now, it so happens, Love reminds us, that Chomsky's approach to language is not
in the least concerned about how humans actually conduct the business of commu-
nication. Chomsky and his followers are interested in delving into the workings of
human linguistic competence or, simply, grammar. They do so in the hope of ulti-
mately being able to come to grips with the mysteries of the human mind. As
Chomsky put it himself on one occasion: ``[...] language is a derivative and perhaps
not a very interesting concept'' (Chomsky, 1980, p. 90). Or, as Neil Smith, a staunch
Chomskyan by self-confession, declares; ``Linguistics is not about language, or lan-
guages, at least that is not its main focus; it is about grammars'' (Smith, 1983, p. 4,
quoted in Widdowson, 1989, p. 129). More recently, Chomsky has resorted to the
use of the technical term Ì-language' but his fundamental position with regard to
the object of linguistics remains unaltered. In his recent book on Chomsky, Smith
(1999, p. 138) says:
At the heart of Chomsky's linguistics is the notion of I-language, a term which

replaces one of the uses of the term `grammar' in his early work. `Grammar'
was used ambiguously to designate both what we have in our heads, and the
linguist's theory of what we have in our `mind-brain'. In Chomsky's current
usage `grammar' still refers to the linguist's theory, but the object of that theory
is now referred to as Ì-language', where Ì' is a mnemonic for Internal, Indivi-
dual, and Intensional.
This is a study of highly abstract principles that govern the human faculty of
language and, in this enterprise, those factors that have to do with communication
are a nuisance rather than an aid. As a matter of fact, the Chomskyan approach
requires that the researcher ®rst ®lter out such factors in order that she may con-
centrate on what is potentially possible rather than what is eectively achieved in
real situations of verbal interaction between persons. Any attempt to bring the issue
of communication to centre stage in our attempt to understand language is tanta-
mount to putting the cart before the horse. Chomsky is categorical when he says:
There is no reason to believe [.....] that language èssentially' serves instrumental

ends, or that the èssential purpose' of language is `communication,' as is often
said, at least if we mean by `communication' something like transmitting
information or inducing belief (Chomsky, 1977, p. 87).
And, answering Searle's charges, he argues that it is not at all necessary that some
communicative intention or another be present every time someone uses language.
I can be using language in the strictest sense with no intention of communicat-

ing. Though my utterances have a de®nite meaning, their normal meaning,
nevertheless my intentions with regard to an audience may shed no light on this

meaning (Chomsky, 1975, p. 62).
So Love's critique of the Searlean enterprise has to do with what seems to him to
be nothing short of a violent and precipitate welding together of two traditions that
are really irreconcilable. In fact so diametrically opposed are the two traditions that
Strawson (1971b) once described the relentless tug-of-war between the two as a
veritable `Homeric struggle'. In Strawson's own words,
A struggle on what seems to be such a central issue in philosophy should have

something of a Homeric quality; and a Homeric struggle calls for gods and
heroes. I can at least, though tentatively, name some living captains and bene-
volent shades: on the one side, say, Grice, Austin, and the later Wittgenstein; on
the other, Chomsky, Frege, and the earlier Wittgenstein (Strawson, 1971b, p.
172).
The tension that Love detects in Searle's attempt to elaborate a theory of speech
acts and portray it as ``complementary rather than competing'' in relation to the
Chomskyan paradigm has thus its roots in a fundamental incompatibility widely
perceived to exist between the two contending traditions whose advocates were
referred to by Strawson as ``the theorists of communication-intention'' and ``the
theorists of formal semantics'' respectively. Here is how Love spells out his thesis:
Searle's marriage of an early-Chomskyan linguistics to his own version of an

Austinian philosophy of language causes problems and mysti®cations, of which
the most fundamental is how a philosophy designed to analyse `the perfor-
mance of illocutionary acts of human communication' can be based on a lin-
guistics whose `goal [...] is not now and never has been to explain
communication' (Borsley and Newmeyer, 1997, p. 47), whose subject-matter is
not second-order cultural products called `languages', which draws or, at the
relevant time, drew an explicit distinction between linguistic `performance' and
an abstract linguistic `competence' in order to concentrate exclusively on the
latter (Love, 1999, p. 16).
The problem identi®ed by Love is indeed a serious one and has important con-
sequences, as the remaining part of his paper goes on to discuss.
2. Objectives
In this paper, I would like to take up the discussion from where Love leaves o.
The question that I want to ask and attempt an answer to is: Granted that there is
indeed this contradiction identi®ed by Love in Searle's theoretical enterprise, why is
it that such a major inconsistency has by and large remained unnoticed or been
passed over in silence by the academic community? Alternatively, how is it that John
Searle has succeeded in staking out a solid reputation as the sole intellectual legatee
of and authorised spokesman for J.L. Austin and, at the same time, interpreting the
late Oxford philosopher's thoughts in a way that they are made to look perfectly
reconcilable with a tradition of thinking about language to which Austin's ideas
have been claimed to be diametrically opposed?1
By way of anticipating myself, I shall contend that, in order to arrive at a satis-
factory answer to the question posed above, one needs to look at the history of the
Speech Act Theory, i.e. of how it evolved out of Austin's original re¯ections on the
subject2 and were subsequently taken up by Searle who went on to build up his
reputation and world-wide recognition as its leading exponent. Such an investigative
tack will necessarily have to consider the social and political aspects of the way
knowledge is produced and disseminated in academia and will thus be part of an
exercise in what is referred to as the `sociology of knowledge' rather than the familiar
philosophy of science (cf. Bloor, 1976; Latour, 1987, Woolgar, 1988). Occasionally,
I shall also make some remarks on the rhetorical strategies used by Searle in order to
promote his own position as Austin's intellectual successor Ð which will bring my
work closer to so-called `rhetoric of science' (Fuller, 1993). Incidentally, to the
extent my analysis is right, it will lend some additional credibility to a fundamental
tenet of integrationism, as succinctly captured by Wolf (1999, p.1) in the following
words (I must hasten to add that my primary objective in writing this paper is not to
vindicate the claims made by the exponents of this movement, notwithstanding the
fact that I am, by and large, sympathetic to them):
[Integrationism] may be initially characterized by the view that sign-makers

create signs, for the purpose of integrating various activities, in the commu-
nicational contexts in which they ®nd themselves: as such they are `real people
doing real things in real time' . . ..
Or, as Harris put it some two decades ago in a book that may be regarded as the
manifesto of that movement,
1
A number of the close associates of Austin have registered that his temperament was that of a radical
reformer (cf. Hampshire, 1967; Warnock, 1969, p. 21). In the words of Lako (1987, p. 21), ``Like Witt-
genstein, Austin was dedicated to showing the inadequacies of traditional philosophical views about lan-
guage and mind that are still widely held''.
2
It has been argued by a number of scholars that Austin may not be all that original as he has been
portrayed to be and that some of the basic insights of what is today known as the speech act theory may
date back to as early as Socrates (Urmson, 1969, p. 23). Smith (1990) traces the origins of the speech act
theory to Thomas Reid and Adolf Reinach, among others. Other candidates for the role of the precursor
to Austin include David Hume (Flew, 1971, p. 482), Wittgenstein, (Silverman and Torode, 1980, p. 211),
G.E. Moore (Furberg, 1963, p. 8; Hampshire, 1969, p. 33; Lacey, 1982, p. 403), Cook, Wilson and Price
(Brown, 1962, p. 341), Berkeley and Peirce (Tsui, 1987, p. 95), Frege (Finlay, 1988) and even such ìllus-
trious unknowns' as Koschmieder (Kech and Stubbs, 1984). But in this paper, I am not interested in the
precise genealogy of the theory Ð which, by the way, is bound to be just as ®ctional as every other myth
of origin. What interests me is what happened to the theory in its passage from Austin to Searle.
[...] what is important from an integrational perspective is not so much the fund
of past linguistic experience as the individual's adaptive use of it to meet the
communicational requirement of the present. That use is Ð and can only be Ð
manifest in the communication situation itself. No new technology is required
to study it. The evidence is available in praesentia. All that is lacking is the
readiness to accept it (Harris, 1981, p. 187).
Drawing on this precious insight, I shall conclude my paper by suggesting that the
theory of speech acts is itself an elaborate speech act Ð or, for that matter, a sign Ð
and therefore subject to not only all the conditions of felicity that attend on these
linguistic acts, but also, insofar as it is a sign, something that carries the indelible
imprint of the sign-maker(s) who created it in the ®rst place. The communication
situation I shall look at is the historical context in which Searle developed Austin's
insights into a full-blown theory.
3. Some preliminary considerations
Before we proceed any further, it is important to draw the readers' attention to a

key phrase in the passage cited above from Love's paper. Love makes a point of
saying that what he is looking at is Searle's `òwn version of an Austinian philoso-
phy of language''. This is not the only place in the paper where Love invokes the
name of Austin while referring to Searle's views. Thus he says elsewhere: `Ìn Searle's
view, as in Austin's, the core of any speech act is the illocutionary act''. (Love, 1999,
p. 12). On yet another page, we come across the following remark: ``Searle con®nes
his examples to the rules of games [...] most strikingly, ceremonies of the kind whose
verbal aspects provided some of Austin's original examples of `performatives'[...]''
(Love, 1999, p. 18). Nor is Love alone in so constantly remembering Austin's name
in connection with that of Searle. In his editorial introduction to the same issue of
Language & Communication in which Love's paper appears, Wolf observes that
``Nigel Love examines a weakness in the Austinian tradition (as represented by
Searle)'' (Wolf, 1999, p. 2) and goes on to remark a little later that ``[the pervasive-
ness and centrality of the theme of language] lives in Austin's and Searle's attempts
to demarcate the domain of the speech act'' (Wolf, 1999, p. 4).
An important question that we must ask at this stage is: just what is the nature of
the link between the mentor and the disciple? What makes it so strikingly dierent
from other famous cases of master±disciple relationship of which Western philoso-
phy has many well-known examples? Thus, although we know that Plato's work, at
least in its initial stages, was heavily in¯uenced by Socrates, we do talk about Plato's
philosophy without mentioning in the same breath the name of his teacher. Like-
wise, we do not go about recalling Plato's name every time we refer to the work of
his equally illustrious disciple, Aristotle. What is it, then, that binds together the
names of Austin and Searle as if they were a pair of philosophical Siamese twins?
Now, there is indeed a broad consensus amongst scholars that Austin was Searle's
primary source of inspiration Ð Caton (1971, p. 4, fn. d) refers to Austin as the
`prime-mover' Ð and that Austin's early thoughts on the subject constitute the life-
blood of what was later developed by Searle as a full-¯edged theory of speech acts.
It is as if Searle took to fruition what Austin was unfortunately prevented from
doing because of his sudden and untimely death. But surely Searle's reputation is
also more than that of a disciple who tidied up his teacher's haphazard and un®n-
ished work. Most scholars also believe that Searle did develop Austin's thoughts in
ways his mentor would most probably not have even imagined. In other words,
there can be no doubt that Searle's contribution to the theory he inherited is very
remarkable and original. What is seldom noticed by scholars who in varying degrees
subscribe to both these views is that the two views are at loggerheads with each
other. That is to say, only one of them can be entirely correct. Since so much of our
appreciation of Searle's role in the development of the speech act theory hinges on
this crucial point, I shall below distinguish between the two views, spelling them out
as Thesis 1 and Thesis 2, respectively.
4. The two theses
Thesis 1 states simply that Searle found all the ingredients of the theory which was
to win him world-wide acclaim in the work of his teacher Austin who, as we know,
published very little in his life time, and who elaborated most of his ideas through
lectures and seminars at Oxford, mainly in the 1940s and the early 1950s and,
between 1955 and 1958, exposed them to a wider public in the United States. This
view is frequently expressed by the authors of introductory text-books as they pre-
sent the theory of speech acts and the circumstances of its early development. Thus
witness what Lyons has to say:
Austin's theory of speech-acts was developed over a number of years; and in its
®nal version (in so far as Austin himself succeeded in producing a ®nal, or
de®nitive, version before his death) it is deliberately modi®ed and extended in
the course of its presentation (Austin, 1962). The term `speech-act' is rarely
used by Austin; and, when he does use it, it is not entirely clear how much of
what is done, or performed, in the production of the utterance he intends it to
cover. [.... ] Since the term `speech act' is now widely employed in work which
derives from Austin, and notably in the title of an in¯uential book by Searle
(1969), we will use it in the present discussion (Lyons, 1977, pp. 725±726).
In other words, Austin came nowhere near to presenting a fully worked out ver-
sion of a theory of speech acts; instead what we ®nd in his writings is at best a the-
ory, as it were, ìn the ong'. Meggle (1985, p. 209) contrasts Austin's ``limited
approach'' with Searle's which he describes as ``more promising'' but is otherwise
happy to treat the two as representing a single, unbroken tradition. The sub-text
that emerges is that what Austin left for posterity was a philosophical torso; the task
of `completing' the work and giving it the ®nishing touches fell into the hands of his
chosen disciple (whether a torso is necessarily incomplete and in need of completion

at the hands of another sculptor is a moot point).
Other writers have followed suit, opting to present Searle's work as basically
Austin's, only more streamlined, more methodical. Thus Levinson (1982, pp. 237±
238) refers to ``the very in¯uential systematisation of Austin's work by Searle,
through whose writings speech act theory has perhaps had most of its impact on
linguistics'' Fraser (1974, p. 433) hails Searle's Speech Acts as ``the only serious
theoretical work in the area'' and declares that Searle ``follow[s] Austin in spirit
though not always in detail'' (p. 434). Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984, p. 19)
reinforce the thesis of a smooth transition from the English philosopher to his
North-American exegete and speak of the ``standard version'' of the speech act
theory ``whose foundations Austin laid and which was elaborated further by Searle
on the basis of his own intuitions'' (the quali®er òn the basis of his own intuitions'
does attribute some originality to Searle's extension of the theory). A more recent
introductory textbook has the following to say apropos of the speech act theory:
`Ìts main developers were the British philosopher John L. Austin (whose post-
humous How to do Things with Words [... ] ) had an enormous impact on linguistic
philosophy, and thereby on linguistics, especially in its pragmatic variant), and the
American John R. Searle, who had studied under Austin at Oxford in the ®fties, and
who became the main proponent and defender of the former's ideas in the United
states, and subsequently world-wide'' (Mey, 1993, pp. 109±110). Burkhardt (1990, p.
1) presents the theory of speech acts as ``founded by Austin and continued by his
disciple Searle and others'' and Thomas (1995), after referring to Austin as ``the
father of pragmatics'' (1995, p. 44), goes on to register that ``Grice put forward a
series of maxims (informal generalizations) to explain how a speech act `works',
Searle tried to establish a set of rules'' (Thomas, 1995, p. 94). Blackburn (1994, p.
30) arms that Austin's thoughts ``pioneered the theory of speech acts, as well as
introducing many of the terms such as locutionary act and illocutionary act''. In a
recent encyclopaedia entry called `Speech act theory Ð an overview,' we come
across the following remark: `Àustin cleared the ground and laid the foundations
for speech act theory, and to him goes the credit for distinguishing locution, illocu-
tion, and perlocution. But it was Searle [... ] who ®rst established criteria for the
de®nitions of illocutions, using promising as an example [ ...]'' (Allan, 1998, p. 931).
LujaÂn MartõÂnez (1997, p. 192) refers to `à philosophical tradition in which we ®nd
names such as Austin or [sic] Searle', giving the reader the impression that the dif-
ference between the two is negligible. Finally, Searle has himself underscored the
in¯uence of Austin's ideas on his philosophical thought, referring to the Oxford
philosopher as the `founder' of the speech act theory (Searle, 1991, p. 81) . Else-
where, reminiscing about his own philosophical youth, Searle has written as follows:
``My earliest work was in the philosophy of language, and a good deal of it was an
attempt to develop a general theory of speech acts. I made extensive use of insights
already developed by other Oxford philosophers, especially Austin'' (Searle, 1997, p.
512).
Thesis 2 claims that Searle is an original philosopher who not only forged a theory
out of the scattered and half-baked thoughts he found in his Oxford teachers but
contributed to it signi®cantly, extending it in ways (for all we know) not imagined by

them. Thus Alston (1991, p. 57) refers to John Searle as ``foremost among those who
have taken the torch from J.L. Austin and developed a theory of illocutionary acts
that occupies a prominent position in the philosophy of language''. Witness also the
following observation by Lamarque (1998, p. 1051): `Ùnfortunately, Austin left his
theory largely unre®ned, due to his early death, though he did attempt a rudimen-
tary taxonomy for illocutionary acts. J. R. Searle, who had studied under Austin,
developed the theory in his in¯uential Speech Acts (1969), though he was critical of
several aspects of Austin's pioneering work [...]''. Van Rees (1992, p. 33) speaks of
``Searle's adaptation of Austin's ideas''.
Thesis 2 is typically presented in the form of a claim to the eect that Austin by no
means came anywhere near proposing a fully worked-out theory or was, for that
matter, not even interested in proposing one, or that, given his scepticism, he could
possibly never have developed a theory all by himself, or, what comes to the same
thing, his philosophical thoughts had a fundamentally negative thrust that could not
have led to the development of a positive theory. Here is how one (otherwise
admiring) commentator evaluates Austin's contribution: `Ìt is impossible to give a
systematic account of Austin's philosophy, for he had none'' (Urmson, 1969, p. 26).
Others have stressed what they interpret as a complete lack of interest on the part of
the Oxford philosopher when it comes to proposing a positive theory. Thus War-
nock (1988, p. 11) refers to the `àlmost throughout undeviatingly negative [and]
critical, even polemically critical'' tone of Austin's lesser known work Sense and
Sensibilia (Austin, 1962b) Ð whose very last phrase ``dismantling the whole doctrine
before it gets o the ground'' would alone seem to suce to justify Warnock's
remark. In Warnock's view, then, Austin `ìn fact held no [...] general theory of
philosophy at all Ð unless a certain purely negative view could be accounted a the-
ory'' (Warnock, 1988, p. 8).
Now, Thesis 2 has also been defended occasionally (though very rarely indeed) by
claiming that the anity between Austin and Searle is more apparent than real. A
case in point is Cavell (1995, p. 44) who guardedly describes Searle as `à philosopher
trained at Oxford while Austin was still alive and whose book on the theory of speech
acts has been and continues to be far more in¯uential Ð in both literary studies and
in philosophy Ð than Austin's original work that invented the subject'' (emphasis
added). Thus, in one swift stroke, Cavell dismisses the received opinion concerning
the smooth continuity between the teacher and the disciple and also hints at how the
latter's enormous prestige was primarily responsible for eclipsing the former's.
5. The importance of keeping the two theses distinct
As already pointed out in Section 3, the two theses are clearly distinct and must be
distinguished from each other. According to Thesis 1, all that Searle did in order to
achieve his niche in the history of speech act theory was to play second ®ddle to his
illustrious mentor and undertake some tidying up operation over the work the latter
left un®nished at his death. Or, if you like, he just happened to be at the right place
at the right time. An appropriate name for Thesis 1 may thus be `The mantle of
Elijah'.
By contrast, Thesis 2 projects an image of Searle as an innovator, an original
philosopher, comparable to the ®gure of Plato in relation to that of Socrates. After
an initial phase which the historians of philosophy refer to as the èarly Socratic
period', Plato did emerge as a philosopher in his own right. Thus, those who advo-
cate Thesis 2 will pay more attention to those aspects of Searle's philosophy where
he clearly departs from Austin's views in directions his mentor might, in all like-
lihood, not have approved of. In other words, the Searle that emerges from Thesis 2
is a philosopher who, as he resolved to venture out on his own, found it expedient
to, as it were, free himself from the shadow of his mentor by asserting his intellectual
independence. A somewhat more picturesque name for Thesis 2 would therefore be
Ùsurpation of the Throne' Ð or, to stick to the Biblical idiom, `The harp of David'.
It so happens, however, that in actual practice, historians as well as ordinary
researchers working in such areas as the philosophy of language, linguistic prag-
matics etc. where the speech act theory is extensively discussed and used as a basic
framework for other investigations, do not always ®nd it easy to distinguish between
the two theses, and instead often con¯ate them. Thus one frequently comes across
graduate students (as well as authors of introductory text books and research papers
in respected journals, though less frequently) who invoke the authority of Austin,
not realising that they are in fact citing the views of Searle Ð invoking an Austin,
that is, recreated by Searle. Alternatively, there are those who simply do not bother
about reading Austin and ®nding out what the Oxford don had to say, because they
think that Austin's original ideas about such matters are at best of historical interest,
prompting some more discerning scholars such as Marina SbisaÁ (1984, p. 93) to
lament that ``direct reference to John L. Austin has become rather unusual in speech
act theory''. Those who systematically bypass Austin thus are most probably rea-
soning along the following lines. If it is indeed the case that what Austin did was
prepare the way for his illustrious disciple, why bother about what the Oxford phi-
losopher might have had to say about the topic of speech acts and related matters,
since one is certain to come across the same issues discussed in a far more lucid and
systematic way in the writings of his Berkeley follower? Why bother, in other words,
if the mantle was received as a gift or legacy or wrenched from its rightful owner?
Richards (1971, p. 519) expresses this idea in the following words: ``Since Searle
basically attempts to extend and weld Austin's views into some kind of a general
theory, we shall [...] con®ne our discussion to the details of the thesis that Searle
himself puts forward.''
Perhaps nowhere else is this practice of rolling Austin and Searle into one Ð of
freely and indiscriminately mixing ideas that were developed by the one but not the
other Ð more evident than in a recent introductory text book on pragmatics. In a
chapter devoted to the speech acts, the author, Yule (1996), moves from a discussion
of Austin's tri-partite distinction of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary
acts [explicitly rejected by Searle (1973)], to a discussion of the so-called IFIDs [or
Ìllocutionary Force Indicating Devices', introduced by Searle (1969) but nowhere to
be come across in Austin's writings], felicity conditions, Ross's (1970) performative
hypothesis (cf. Section 8 and 9), and ®nally to a discussion of Austin's original and
highly tentative ®ve-way speech act classi®cation [dismissed by Searle, who in fact
oers an alternative taxonomy (Searle, 1979b)]. Although the author of an intro-
ductory course-book ought not to be taken to task for not going into all the details,
the fact remains that the underlying premise seems to be that it hardly matters who
contributed what to the overall theory or that there is a smooth continuity from
Austin to Searle.
6. Three strategies of containment
In this section of the paper and the next, I want to look into some of the speci®c
aspects of the intellectual climate that favoured Searle's appropriation of Austin's
ideas. It is my contention that Austin's original thoughts on the topic of speech acts
and related issues were somewhat ùnwieldy' from the point of view of the Philoso-
phical Establishment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Searle's attempt to `stream-
line' those thoughts and put them back on to the beaten track of analytic philosophy
was more than welcome, it was a heavensent intervention that saved the philoso-
phical community from having to put up with an illustrious member who was
threatening to become something of an embarrassment. Clearly, this is a bold claim
and must be buttressed by convincing supporting arguments. This is what I shall
attempt to do in the next few pages.
But ®rst it is important to look into the ways and means by which the philoso-
phical community has confronted potential threats to its integrity coming from its
own ranks. Among recent cases that immediately spring to mind is that of
Nietzsche. With his resoundingly devastating critique of Socratic rationalism and
hence the very basis upon which he believed the edi®ce of Western Philosophy had
been erected, Nietzsche was soon rightly perceived to be an iconoclast and a loom-
ing threat to the integrity of the discipline.3 The reaction from a number of his
3
There are some anities between Austin and Nietzsche that are striking. Towards the end of his How
to Do Things with Words, Austin (1962a, p. 151) remarks with a certain impish satisfaction so typical of
Nietzsche that he had all along been primarily interested in `playing Old Harry with' two `fetishes' that are
nothing but two of the most important dichotomous distinctions on which the entire superstructure of
Western philosophy is erected: `fact vs. value' and `truth vs. falsehood'. About the latter opposition,
Derrida (1982, p. 322) remarks: Àustin had to free the analysis of the performative from the authority of
the value of truth, from the opposition true/false, at least in its classical form, occasionally substituting it
for the value of force, of dierence of force (illocutionary or perlocutionary force). It is this, in a thought
which is nothing less than Nietzschean, which seems to me to beckon toward Nietzsche; who often
recognized in himself a certain anity with a vein of English thought'. Felman (1980) is another writer
who recognises a certain Nietzschean strain in Austin's philosophy. Austin's ®erce opposition to such
immaterial entities as concepts, propositions and universals is also reminiscent of Nietzsche who was
described by Arthur Danto (1965, p. 12) as à critic of concept and a word tormenting anarchist'. As a
mater of fact, Danto has also pointed to Nietzsche's proximity to analytic philosophy: `Nietzsche's a-
nities to analytical philosophy [...] are nowhere more evident than in his preoccupations with language.
Common sense is after all expressed in ordinary language; in speaking the language we have learnt from
infancy, we are prescribing how the world is believed and comprehended' (Danto, 1965, p. 83).
contemporaries was to dismiss him as an òutsider' to philosophy. This was often

done by paying him a left-handed compliment: praising his ¯air for writing and his
literary talents (which, given the notorious stand-o between philosophy and litera-
ture, meant nothing short of a summary condemnation of Nietzsche as a philoso-
pher: the left-handed compliment is meant to be a sore reminder that he pandered to
base passions, desires, emotions, sentiments and what have you Ð all in the true
tradition of poets and others literarily inclined). Nietzsche, in other words, was
demonised. (One can always give a dog a bad name and hang it!)
If Nietzsche was demonised, the tactic used against Wittgenstein, as he too was
perceived in his later years as a maverick of sorts and became a source of embar-
rassment to the philosophical establishment, was to insist that there are really two
Wittgensteins Ð the Wittgenstein of the Tracatus and the Wittgenstein of the Philo-
sophical Investigations. Though scholars do remain divided about just how the two
are or are not related to each other, the underlying assumption that a line can somehow
be drawn so as to distinguish an earlier from a later phase has survived all critical
scrutiny. Thus, Bertrand Russell, under whose supervision and blessing Wittgenstein
had completed his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1961), could admit
to being at a loss in coming to terms with the sort of re¯ection his once-favourite
pupil was to undertake in his Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1968). The
same Lord Russell, who had enthusiastically welcomed the publication of the Tracta-
tus, describing it as a book ``which no serious philosopher can aord to neglect''
(Russell, 1961, p. xxii) was to write the following in his enthusiastic foreword to a
somewhat scurrilous condemnation of the whole enterprise of linguistic philosophy by
Gellner (1959):
When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum which could be lifted o. I
found that the clock went very much faster without the pendulum. If the main
purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum.
True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach
oneself to be indierent to time. The linguistic philosophy, which cares only
about language, and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the
clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went
more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace (Russell, 1959, p. xv).
Nietzsche was unceremoniously ostracised. In Wittgenstein's case, the philosophical

community found an ingenious alternative. They invented not one, but two Wittgen-
steins. Once this was done, anyone who wished to do so could still swear by Wittgen-
stein 1 and, without entering into a contradiction or feeling any sort of embarrassment,
reject Wittgenstein 2 as a once-serious philosopher, now gone eccentric.
With Austin, the tactic that was used was altogether dierent. They (i.e. the pow-
ers that be) re-interpreted the Oxford philosopher so that he could be welcomed
back to the fold which he was threatening, if not to quit, at the very least to rue
up. The extraordinary success of this strategy may in part explain the following
rather curious fact noticed by Taylor (1981, p. 263) against the backdrop of his gen-
eral puzzlement as to why there has so far been very little impact of Wittgenstein's
later philosophy on linguistics: `Ìndeed, even J. L. Austin Ð often grouped with

Wittgenstein as a founder of the `linguistic turn' in philosophy Ð has acquired a
steadily increasing presence in linguistics''.4 It is as part of the careful execution of
this strategy that, as I shall argue below, Searle's critical intervention turned out to
be providential. Not only was the time ripe for such an intervention, Searle himself
realised the opportunity that lay ahead and was quick to cash in on it.
7. The king is dead; long live the king
At the time of Austin's untimely death in 1960, the Oxford philosopher was one of
the most-talked-about ®gures in Austro-Anglo-American philosophy. His William
James Lectures at Harvard in 1955 had already made him a celebrity in the USA.
Shortly before his death in 1960, rumour had it that he had accepted to take on a
teaching position at the University of California. Although the veracity of this
rumour has been questioned, few Austin biographers have denied that expectations
were running high of his continued presence in the US or at least more frequent trips
to and fro. In a biographical sketch written shortly after Austin's death, Warnock
reminisces as follows:
Austin visited Harvard as William James Lecturer in the spring term of 1955,
and the University of California in the autumn of 1958. In both cases, he made
a powerful impact on those who heard him; and in Berkeley, even before the
semester he spent there, he was strongly solicited to take a permanent appoint-
ment. By this invitation he was greatly tempted (though it is not true, as has
been stated, that he had ®nally resolved to accept it). He was fascinated, I
believe, by the whole phenomenon of America Ð by its size, by its populous-
ness and resources, by the sense there of endless possibilities and a wide-open
future (Warnock, 1969, p. 21).
Looking at the development of the speech act theory from a historical perspective,
what interests us is that Austin's untimely death must have come as a sudden blow
4
But, apart from this, Taylor is absolutely right in regard to the underlying premise that Austin and
Wittgenstein have a lot more in common than many scholars are willing to concede Ð important excep-
tions being Lako (1987) (see ft. 1 above). It is important to point out here that, despite all the signi®cant
points of similarity between Wittegenstein and Austin, Searle has been keen on driving a wedge between
the two. Even as he is anxious to claim a direct line of intellectual descent from Austin, Searle has made a
point of distancing himself from Wittgensteinian ideas of family resemblance and language games, espe-
cially as these appear to threaten his own project of positing ideal speech acts and their universally valid
types. Thus in Speech Acts, he speaks of `ìnstitutional theories of communication, like Austin's, mine,
and I think Wittgenstein's' as opposed to `naturalistic theories of meaning' '' (Searle, 1969, p. 71). But
elsewhere he writes: ``There are not, as Wittgenstein (on one possible interpretation) and many others
have claimed, an in®nite number of language games or uses of language. Rather, the illusion of limitless
uses of language is engendered by an enormous unclarity about what constitutes the criteria for delimiting
one language or use of language from another'' (1979b, p. 29).
to the philosophical establishment in the US which was forced to undertake urgent

steps to ®ll in the enormous vacuum the episode had left behind.
7.1. The election of Searle as the heir apparent
Searle's appointment to the post originally meant for the English philosopher was
no doubt what the university could have best done under the circumstances. Searle
had already built up a considerable reputation as an up-and-coming philosopher
and had the additional merit of having pursued his studies at Oxford which in a
sense entitled him to take on the (at that time) none-too-comfortable role as Austin's
intellectual successor and legatee.
But there was a major hurdle to be overcome. Austin's reputation was that of a
contentious ®gure, a philosophical ¯y in the ointment. Most of those who knew him
at Oxford have registered the fact Austin was a thoroughly unconventional philo-
sopher. As was pointed out in Section 2, many of those who knew him personally
even doubted if Austin ever came anywhere near propounding a uni®ed theory or
for that matter was even interested in doing it. According to Furberg (1963, p. viii),
`Àustin's intellect was mainly critical and negative'' and ``His positive suggestions
are mostly concerned with moral philosophy''. Berlin (1973, p. 13) writes:
Austin looked at whatever was placed before him, and was ready to follow the
argument wherever it led. It was later maintained by some of his critics (at least
in conversation) that this philosophical spontaneity and apparent freedom from
preconceived doctrine were not altogether genuine: that in fact they were ela-
borate Socratic devices which concealed a fully worked-out positive doctrine
which he was not yet ready to reveal. I believe this to be false.
`Ìndeed,'' Berlin goes on to observe, `Ì cannot recall anything I ever heard, or
read, of Austin's that contained a straightforward, old-fashioned philosophical
argument'' (his italics) (Berlin, 1973, p. 20). In the words of Passmore (1957, p. 450):
`Èven amongst his closest associates [...] there is more than a little controversy
about what Austin was trying to do and his relevance to the traditional pursuits of
philosophy''. Katz refers to the whole orientation of ordinary language philosophy
as `ànti-theoretical'' (Katz, 1966, p. 88) and says the theory of speech acts is ``no
theory at all, but merely a loose assortment of observations about various aspects of
language'' (Katz, 1977, 1980, p. 230). Katz is in fact so impressed by what he diag-
noses as a certain self-destructive instinct in Austin that an entire chapter of his 1977
book is devoted to the theme of `How to save Austin from Austin'. Incidentally,
Katz's charges are levelled at not only Austin, but at Searle as well.
Warnock has the following to say with respect to the thoroughly informal nature
of the famous Saturday morning sessions at Oxford where Austin discussed his
favourite themes with a handful of fellow philosophers:
It was not that the proceedings were formally disciplined; on the contrary, they
were exceptionally ¯uid and free; with no formal order at all. Nor were they
solemn; on the contrary, they were continuously enjoyable and amusing Ð

funny, in fact (Warnock, 1973, p. 32).
Moravcsik (1967) draws our attention to Austin's persistently nonchalant

approach to philosophy and his refusal to theorise precipitately. In his own words,
The Socratic kind of self-questioning whether practiced by Socrates or Ð in our

own times Ð by Austin, has no theoretic aim and leads to a badly needed
sharpening of our linguistic intuitions (Moravcsik, 1967, p. 233).
In much the same vein, Urmson recalls Austin's constant plea against hasty
theorising on the grounds that ``premature theorizers bend their idiom to suit the
theory'' (Urmson, 1967, p. 234) and Hampshire (1967, p. 243) assures us that Austin
was highly critical of ``premature system-building'' on the part of professional
philosophers. Forrester (1990) argues that Austin's work is before anything else a
thorough criticism of the tendency to reify so typical of theories of language
informed by logical positivism and the earlier Wittgenstein. Silverman and Torode
(1980, p. 207) have noted that `Àustin may be treated as engaging in a thoroughly
worthwhile critique of system-building'', and further that, ``[i]n its place, he oers a
confrontation with the concrete world, expressed in a wonder at the subtleties of
ordinary usage and its relation to the `practical matters' that have arisen in the life-
times of many generations''. Writing speci®cally about the form of reasoning devel-
oped by Austin in How to Do Things with Words, Max Black notes that the impression
one is left with at the end of the book is that of a long and tiresome hunting expedition
with precious little to celebrate in the end and, what is worse, the nagging suspicion
that that was exactly how it was all planned to be. In his own words,
The late John Austin's William James Lectures might well have borne the sub-
title Ìn Pursuit of a Vanishing Distinction'. Although the chase is remorseless,
glimpses of the quarry become increasingly equivocal and the hunter is left
empty-handed at last. It is hard to know what has gone awry. Has the wrong
game been pursued-and in the wrong direction? (Black, 1969, p. 401).
Forguson comes very near to portraying Austin as some sort of a latter-day phi-
losophical Sisyphus when he writes:
It sometimes happens that a philosopher will develop a view on some topic and
then come to reject it. J.L. Austin was perhaps unique in that he not only
rejected a philosophical view of which he was the author, he patiently devel-
oped the view and then showed it to be ultimately unsatisfactory within the
compass of the same work. And he did this not once but three times, in material
intended for publication (Forguson, 1969b, p. 412).
In other words, Austin had no doubt established a reputation for himself that was
solid and unquestionable; but he was also widely perceived to be an inveterate
debunker of received wisdom who revelled in philosophical debauchery to the det-

riment of system-building. To quote Shaw (1990, p. 76), ``There has been much loose
talk of Austin's continually contradicting himself as he goes along, taking up and
then discarding positions with Dionysian abandon''.
However, what the Philosophical Establishment in the US needed was a system-
builder Ð indeed, one might begin to wonder, what else is mainstream philosophy
anywhere in the world all about if not system-building!! Ð who could inaugurate a
new paradigm. And Searle oered himself as the man cut out for the job. The
novelty that he introduced into the Austinian framework was the promise of orga-
nising the random thoughts of his teacher into a coherent and well-articulated the-
ory. In Shaw's words, ``For Searle, Austin's own work, pioneering in more ways
than one, can also be codi®ed, and it ought to be'' (Shaw, 1990, p. 91). Searle's
appearance on the scene was not just opportune, it was almost providential. With
his freshly submitted D.Phil thesis on sense and reference [®nished in 1959 and
subsequently developed into his Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Lan-
guage (Searle, 1969)], Searle had just returned from Oxford and was the right can-
didate to ®ll in the vacuum left behind by Austin's untimely death.
But the very sub-title of Searle's book also announced in unequivocal terms a
major dierence between the Oxford don and his North American legatee. Searle
made it very clear right from the very beginning that he had little sympathy for the
so-called `linguistic philosophy' and insisted that his own work be seen as part of the
more august tradition of `philosophy of language'. In fact, it is precisely this tradi-
tion that Searle invokes in an early paper entitled Àustin on locutionary and illo-
cutionary acts' (Searle, 1973) in which he argues that Austin's notion of `locutionary
act' should be replaced by his own `propositional act'. After speculating that `Àus-
tin may have had in mind the distinction between the content or, as some philoso-
phers call it, the proposition, in an illocutionary act and the force or illocutionary
type of the act'' (Searle, 1973, p. 155),5 he goes on state:
This distinction, in various forms, is by now common in philosophy and can be

found in philosophers as diverse as Frege, Hare, Lewis, and Meinong (Searle,
1973, p. 155).
In other words, Searle made it clear right from the very beginning of his specta-
cular career and rise to academic stardom that his mission was to put the philoso-
phical insights into the phenomenon of speech acts that he had picked up at Oxford
back on the tracks. If Austin had caused some alarm by appearing to want to
5
In a calculated rhetorical ploy, Searle invokes at this point the authority he has conferred upon himself
as someone who personally knew Austin. Thus he says in a footnote: `Àustin once told me he thought a
distinction could be made along these lines Ð but it is not clear that he intended the locutionary-illocu-
tionary distinction to capture it''. Despite the rhetorical merits of this tactic, I believe that Searle is com-
pletely mistaken about his implicit claim that Austin himself would have come to a similar conclusion. The
strongest evidence against Searle's claim here is Austin's clear dismissal of concepts, propositions, and
universals (cf. Section 10).
straggle away from the herd, Searle was determined to stay within the fold and
remain faithful to its traditions. It hardly mattered to him that this involved sacri®-
cing what was most characteristic of Austin's philosophical technique Ð sticking to
the ordinary use of words in their ordinary contexts. As Harris (1996, p. 49) has
remarked, the introduction of the metalinguistic unit called `proposition' in Western
philosophy helped ``bypass the problems encountered if the actual words uttered are
treated as the basis of logic''.
7.2. The coronation and consolidation of power
By 1979, Searle could proudly announce that he had been successfully facing ``the
challenge of trying to provide an adequate formalization of the theory [of speech
acts] using the resources of modern logic, particularly set theory'' (Searle, 1979 a,
p. xii), adding that the ®rst concrete result of that line of inquiry was already under
way in the form of a book in collaboration with Vanderveken (cf. Searle and Van-
derveken, 1985). Since then Searle himself seems to have had seconds thoughts on
the viability of such a programme (i.e. to judge by his reticence and apparent lack of
interest in continuing the line of enquiry), but his erstwhile collaborator Vanderve-
ken has been persistent in his attempt at `à partial uni®cation of speech act theory
and of classical truth conditional formal semantics'' (cf. Vanderveken, 1990, p. 2).
Interestingly, in more recent work, Vanderveken (1994) Ð presumably acting on his
own Ð has evinced the hope of arriving at a ``complete formalisation'' of the theory.
Among others who have entertained similar ambitions is Kuroda (1986).
Price (1994) has argued that there is yet another important sense in which Searle's
intervention into the Austinian tradition may be seen as a throw-back. Price identi-
®es in what he refers to as the claim of `non-factualism' the `crucial insight' of the
linguistic movement in philosophy of which Austin was a key ®gure. Non-factualism
is the denial of the putative primacy of the fact-stating role of language. According
to Price, non-factualism was widely accepted in the philosophical community in
1950s, as evidenced by the prestigious philosophical journals of the period. But then,
with Searle, there was a complete reversal of the trend. To cite Price,
At the time [i.e. in 1950s], many of the non-factualist endeavours drew on the
new terminology of speech act theory, taking their lead at least in part from J.L.
Austin. It is therefore somewhat ironic that when non-factualism came to be
seen as discredited, one of the works responsible was Searle's Speech Acts. Non-
factualism was thus disowned by the movement from which, at least in part, it
drew its inspiration (Price, 1994, p. 132).
But then Searle had, by now, also made it amply clear that he intended to be
Austin's sole legatee and authorised spokesman. And, furthermore, there can be
little doubt that, as the years since then have amply proved, Searle's interpretation
of Austin's thoughts has generally been recognised as the only authorised version
(indeed, as we have already seen, to the point of letting many scholars think they are
working on Austin's original insights even as they are unwittingly looking at them in
the form in which they were ®ltered through Searle's èxegesis'). In the words of
Leonardi and SbisaÁ (1984, p. 1), ``the fundamental assumptions of received speech
act theory [are] mainly due to John Searle'' (italics added). Or, as Du Bois (1993, p.
49) puts it, many of the early adherents
either left the [...] standard Searlean speech-act theory implicit in their applica-
tion of it, or perfunctorily repeated those elements which they saw no reason
not to endorse (quoted in Duranti, 1997, p. 227).
Now, how could Searle claim to be extending Austin's original line of thinking on
the one hand and, at the same time, eectively undertake an about-turn on the
other, forcing the line of thinking back to the beaten track of mainstream analytic
philosophy? The answer is that he did so by persuasively claiming that, except for
some dierences of emphasis here and there, what he was doing was essentially
interpreting the thoughts of his mentor. In this project, he was aided and abetted by
the wide-spread perception that Austin had left behind him an un®nished philoso-
phical project Ð a theory, if you will, in the making. We have already seen how
some close associates of Austin such as Urmson and Warnock were also convinced
that Austin had no interest in Ð or at the very least, was in no hurry to undertake Ð
system-building.6 In its most critical form, this meant that Austin changed his views
so frequently that there was no prospect for the emergence of a solid, fully articu-
lated and coherent philosophical project. Warnock recalls that `Àustin himself said
that the views expounded in the [William James] lectures `were formed in 1939''' and
goes on to qualify the statement with the following observation: ``He must have
meant, of course, `began to be formed', since it would obviously be wrong to sup-
pose that his thinking about these topics was completely static or unchanging over
the following twenty years'' (Warnock, 1988, p. 105). Searle himself has spoken of
``the misleading appearance of unity of Austin's views'', adding that `ìn fact they
developed and changed a good deal over the years'' (Searle, 1966, p. 389).
The whole issue is at the very heart of the famous dispute between Derrida
(1977a,b) and Searle (1977) over the role of parasitism in Austin. Derrida (1977 a)
argues that Austin's secret desire to capture the èssence' of speech acts ¯ounders
concomitantly with the rather painful realisation on his part that so-called `parasitic'
discourse (literature, for instance) is just what makes serious discourse possible to
begin with. Derrida's point is that Austin's true greatness lies not so much in what
he eventually comes up with but in the struggle that he goes through in trying to
stake out a theory and in his untiring persistence, reminiscent of, say, the Greek
tragic hero. In his response to Derrida, Searle dismisses the whole idea with the
complacent remark:
6
At the end of his paper `Pretending' (Austin, 1961c, p. 271, fn.) Austin comes up with the following
remark that eloquently sums up his philosophical approach: `Ì dreamt a line that would make a motto for
a sober philosophy: Neither a be-all nor an end-all be''.
Derrida seems to think that Austin's exclusion [of parasitic forms] is a matter of
great moment, a source of deep metaphysical diculties, and that the analysis
of parasitic discourse might create some insuperable diculties for the theory of
speech acts. But the history of the subject has proved otherwise. Once one has a
general theory of speech acts Ð a theory Austin did not live long enough to
develop himself Ð it is one of the relatively simpler problems to analyse the
status of parasitic discourse, that is, to meet the challenge contained in Derrida's
question: ``What is the status of this parasitism?'' (Searle, 1977, p. 205).
This passage is interesting because it presents a number of the key features that
have marked Searle's self-image vis-aÁ-vis his mentor. Whereas, on the one hand, he
takes full credit for developing the theory of speech acts, Searle is also, on the other
hand, equally eager to claim a smooth continuity between Austin and himself,
despite all the dierences.
So the stage was set for the disciple to `continue' the work left un®nished by the
master and at the same time, armed with the authority now conferred upon him,
endeavour to `streamline' it so as to bring it in line with the great tradition,
unmindful of whether or not the changes introduced would make the master squirm
in his grave. It is arguably the case that what Searle eectively did was to put Austin
on the Procrustean bed of conventional philosophy, reclaiming him back to the fold
and at the same time ensuring his own status as the only authorised spokesman for
Austin.
8. Bowdlerisation of Austin at Searle's hands and its timeliness
Under the pretext of `tying up the loose ends' in Austin's theorising, Searle eec-
tively tidied it up so as to make it more `palatable' to the Philosophical Establish-
ment-and, as we shall see below, more amenable to instant application, notably by
linguists working in the then fashionable Transformational-Generative paradigm.7
The essentially negative thrust of Austin's philosophical musings Ð which, as we
have already seen, did not go unnoticed by many of Austin's early commentators Ð
was conveniently pushed underneath the carpet, conferring upon what little
remained the trimmings of a well-articulated and coherent theory. Austin was, in
short, bowdlerised. As Falkenberg (1990, p. 130) remarks:
7
The real signi®cance of this move can only be appreciated against the backdrop of a controversy that
raged in the US between 1949 and 1967 (cf. Lyas, 1971), involving, on the one hand, those who pleaded
for the empirical concerns of linguistic science [Fodor and Katz, 1971; Mates, 1971; New, 1971; Vendler,
(1971)] on the other, sympathisers of linguistic philosophy who saw little hope in linguistics for philosophy
(Austin, 1971; Cavell, 1971; Hare, 1971; Hensen, 1971; Ryle 1971). What the debate underscored was a
stand-o between the linguists and philosophers, apparently heading for a stalemate. Searle must indeed
be given the credit for defusing that state of aairs and preparing the grounds for an entente cordiale
which did materialise in the ensuing years, thanks to his doting overtures to the Generative Semanticists
(at what price is an issue we still need to look into).
[...] Searle's book of 1969 Ð despite its sub-title Ð has to be considered a major
success: it was ground-breaking for linguistics and helped to establish a new
discipline: linguistic pragmatics. This is all the more ironic as Searle took great
pains over demarcating his own concerns from those of linguistics and empha-
tically identi®ed himself as a philosophical semanticist (1969, ch. 1.1.). But he
soon caught the signs of the time and began taking sides in linguistics [...]
As noted by a number of commentators, one of the ®rst casualties that the theory
of speech acts suered at the hands of Searle was the action character of speech acts.
Rolf (1990, p. 147) suspects that Searle reduced speech acts to ordinary sentences
and asks, `Ìs the tem speech act just another word for sentence, or is it intended to
denote a speci®c kind of actions, i.e., linguistic actions?'' Similar objections have
also been raised more recently by Bertolet (1994) and Holdcroft (1994). Following
Searle's lead, however, it soon became common practice among linguists to speak of
the illocutionary force of sentences (cf. Fraser, 1971). It is interesting to mention
here in passing that in Alston (1971), the author takes credit for being one of the
earliest interpreters of Austin to think of sentences as being invested with `ìllocu-
tionary act potential'' (Alston, 1964), but makes a point of adding parenthetically:
``This is not Austin's concept of an illocutionary act, whatever that is, though I did
®lch the term from him'' (emphasis in the original) (Alston, 1971, p. 35). In Alston
(1994), the author reiterates the point in the following words:
This view was, as far as I know, ®rst unveiled in public by myself in Alston
(1963) and (1964b). But it received little development in print since that period.
It was embraced by John Searle (1969), but he has done little to spell out a
theory of linguistic meaning in these terms (Alston, 1994, p. 30).
As is well-known, Searle prepares his grounds for a theory of speech acts by ®rst
setting up a number of binary oppositions Ð to wit, ``regulative vs. constitutive
rules'' and ``brute vs. institutional facts'', etc. These dichotomous oppositions have
been the mainstay of Searle's ambitious programme, as is evidenced by the impor-
tance given to them in his recent The Construction of Social Reality (Searle, 1995).
[The contrast with Austin's philosophical style becomes clear as one recalls the lat-
ter's famous exhortation ``to abandon old habits of Gleichschaltung, the deeply
ingrained worship of tidy-looking dichotomies'' (Austin, 1962b, p.3)]. What is
important to stress here is that the two dichotomous distinctions that Searle invokes
as the central pillars of his theoretical edi®ce derive their strength from orthodox
philosophical realism.8
8
Searle has been a die-hard advocate of orthodox realism and invoked adherence to it as a criterion for
de®ning the very notion of rationality. To quote him, ``Metaphysical realism is [...] not a thesis or a the-
ory; it is rather the condition of having theses or theories or even denying theses or theories'' (Searle, 1990,
p. 40). Or again, ``Realism does not function as a thesis, hypothesis, or supposition. It is, rather, the
condition of the possibility of a certain set of practices, particularly linguistic practices. The challenge,
thus, to those who would like to reject realism is to try to explain the intelligibility of our practices in light
of that rejection'' (Searle, 1993, p. 81).
Searle's adherence to orthodox realism is in sharp contrast with Austin's own

discussion of the familiar problems of metaphysics. As Stoutland (1989, p. 96)
remarks, realism is predicated, inter alia, on the assumption that truth is non-epis-
temic. Stoutland goes on to point out that the world of philosophy is not simply
divided between realists and non-realists because, were it so, a non-realist would
ipso facto be an anti-realist and a candidate for the charges of relativism. In Sense
and Sensibilia, Austin comes up with an argument which clearly identi®es him as a
`non-realist' in Stoutland's sense. Arguing against Ayer's famous claim that judge-
ments about material objects are doomed to be irremediably inconclusive, Austin
extends a line of reasoning he had initiated earlier in his broadside against the so-
called àrgument from illusion'. Austin takes up the following familiar riddle: When
a church is camou¯aged as a barn or a straight stick is placed in a tumbler full of
water, what exactly is one in fact looking at as one contemplates these objects?
Contrary to the received wisdom, Austin insists that the correct answers in these
cases should be `à church camou¯aged so as to look like a barn'' and `à straight
stick made to appear bent'' (Austin, 1962b, pp. 44±55). Arguably then, what Austin
is insisting on is that the epistemic state of the observer, i.e. the knowledge that she
happens to have about the deliberate attempt (on someone else's part) to deceive her
senses, is part and parcel of the objectual reality (or, of the truth conditions attend-
ing on a statement made about that reality) or, simply put, truth is epistemically
aected.9
Once the important step of replacing Austin's `locutionary acts' with the run-of-
the-mill `propositions' (for long, common currency amongst analytic philosophers)
had been taken, it was relatively easy for Searle to embark on his mission of system-
building. Where Austin showed reluctance when it came to summarising his rather
sketchy ®ndings in the form of a full-¯edged theory on the grounds that a lot more
of careful spade-work needed to be done, Searle was all too happy proposing the
fundamental structure of a theory, even if it meant making signi®cant departures
from Austin's thoughts on the subject. In the words of Koller (1970, p. 219):
Searle is not obliged, of course, to spell out the theory Austin might have been
pursuing; nor does he. But, neither, surprisingly does he make any use of the
methods of analysis which led Austin to his notion of illocutionary acts.
Although he uses some of Austin's terms and insights, his purpose diers: he
wishes to set forth the necessary and sucient conditions by which a stretch of
speaking is to be classed as an illocutionary act.
9
David Pears (1969, pp. 54±55) makes the following remarks that have a bearing on the present dis-
cussion: `Ìn all his work, critical and constructive, his paramount purpose was to keep philosophy in close
contact with human experience. [....] It is as if the way to represent the third dimension on a plane surface
had just been discovered ± or, rather, rediscovered, because Austin's realism was not entirely new, and so
too were the meticulousness and devotion with which he practised it'' (italics added). Apropos of the main
thrust of Austin's arguments against sense-data, Forguson (1969b, p. 311) argues that ``throughout the
book Austin argues that the empirical facts to which the sense-datum theorist appeals in order to raise the
problems of perception do not actually con¯ict with our every-day beliefs, if we take the trouble to
describe these facts carefully, and fully, and in detail''.
But then, so great was Searle's impact on linguistics in the 1970s that many scho-
lars were increasingly getting interested in the ``problem of relating illocutionary
force to grammar'' (Mittwoch, 1976, p 41) Ð an issue they felt they could no longer
postpone. By 1980, it was common to come across such carefully worded remarks
where the metamorphosis of Austin into Searle was simply taken for granted and
the price tag that went with it ingeniously downplayed (Obs.: Recall that the term
`propositional act' is due to Searle, not Austin):
The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. [....] Such types of acts as
those exempli®ed above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and
they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts
such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts (Searle, et al., 1980b, p. vii).
Another important step in the direction of creating a theory out of Austin's ori-
ginal insights and making it attractive to linguists had been announced by Searle as
early as 1969 when he formulated what he referred to as ``the principle of expressi-
bility''. Simply put, the principle of expressibility states that ``whatever can be meant
can be said'' (Searle, 1969, p. 17). There can be little doubt that Searle formulated
this principle under the direct in¯uence of his Oxford teacher, P.F. Strawson. The
following excerpt from a 1964 essay by Strawson contains the all the essentials of the
principle of expressibility:
Whatever doubts may be entertained about Austin's notions of meaning and of

locutionary act, it is enough for present purposes to be able to say, as I think we
clearly can, the following about their relation to the notion of illocutionary
force. The meaning of a (serious) utterance, as conceived by Austin, always
embodies some limitation on its possible force, and sometimes Ð as, for
example, in some cases where an explicit performative formula, like Ì apologize',
is used-the meaning of an utterance may exhaust its force; that is there may be
no more to the force than there is to the meaning; but very often the meaning,
though it limits, does not exhaust, the force (Strawson, 1971 pp. 149±150).
Strawson's claim, later on worked by Searle into an article of faith, is that, in

certain cases, as when an explicit performative verb is used, one does not need to
look for anything beyond the very linguistic meaning of that sentence to work out
the illocutionary potential of that sentence. In other words, the sentence containing
the explicit performative verb must be the canonical form of the sentence Ð or, in
terms of the model of grammar that was in vogue when Searle enunciated the
principle Ð must represent the underlying structure of all sentences, tout court. That
Austin himself would most probably have refrained from making such a sweeping
statement is evident from such remarks as: ``The explicit performative rules out
equivocation and keeps the performance ®xed, relatively'' (emphasis added) (Austin,
1962, p. 76) and ``There seem to be clear cases where the same formula seems
sometimes to be an explicit performative and sometimes to be descriptive, and may
even trade on this ambivalence'' (Austin, 1962, p. 78). Ducrot and Todorov (1982,
pp. 402±403) claim that Searle and many other later theorists of speech acts made an
important departure from Austin when they sought to pin down speech acts by dint
of pre-established and purely conventional rules Ð ``The eects of an illocutionary
act cannot be contained, in terms of interpretation, by means of rules'' (my transla-
tion). Anyhow, given Strawson's exegesis of Austin and, added to that, Searle's
axiomatic principle, it is but a small step to arrive at what is referred to in the lit-
erature as the `performative hypothesis' (see Section 9 below for further discussion).
Leech has argued that the idea ``that a performative, an utterance containing an
explicit performative verb, is the canonical form of utterance, the yardstick in terms
of which the forces of other utterances are to be explicated'' is muddle-headed and
called it the `performative fallacy' (Leech, 1983, p. 175). Leech is of the opinion that
Austin too ``¯irted with the fallacy'' (p. 175). But it is certainly true that Austin came
nowhere near developing the ¯eeting idea into a full-blown doctrine such as Searle's
principle of expressibility.
Where Austin had characteristically rejoiced in leaving his audiences perplexed by
his systematic refusal to theorise, here was his disciple who was at last showing some
signs of hope that, with some conceptual streamlining, it was possible to accom-
modate his mentor's random and haphazard insights into the framework of a
workable theory.
9. Speech act theory and generative linguistics
The quali®er `workable' merits special attention. Because what guaranteed the
instant success of the speech act theory and, with it, the world-wide acclamation of
Searle as Austin incarnate was the possibility of the theory's immediate application,
especially in the neighbouring discipline of linguistics. Thus Pak, while sharply cri-
tical of several aspects of Searle's theorisation of speech acts-which in his view
revealed `ìnsuperable diculties on closer inspection'' (Pak, 1974, p. 145), readily
conceded that it had become ``popular among linguists'' (p. 145). `Ì regard the
notion of `speech act'',' declared Wunderlich (1980, p. 291), `às one of the most
fruitful notions of contemporary linguistic theorizing.'' Also pertinent to the present
discussion is the following remark by Koller (1970, pp. 217±218):
It was to be expected that a certain kind of philosopher would be tempted to

develop a general theory of speech acts after encountering the half-theories,
hints, and indirections thereto in the work of J.L. Austin. John Searle is that
philosopher. The dierence between Searle's work and Austin's, however, is
that the theory of what Austin was doing was indierent to him, whereas
Searle's book asks to be measured solely in terms of the adequacy of the theory
it presents.
And the adequacy of the theory, as I shall argue below, had to do with the pro-
mise it held of immediate applicability [although Koller himself had gone on to
describe Searle's Speech Acts `à maddening book to read'', adding that ``the
linguists should ®nd it even more exasperating'' (p. 219)]. In retrospect, it seems clear
that Searle's decisive reinterpretation of Austin's original insights was just the sort
of added impetus that a group of Young Turks within the ranks of the Chomskyan
paradigm in linguistics in the late 1960s and early 1970s was waiting for. Under the
leadership of Ross (1970), McCawley (1971), Fillmore (1972), Lako (1972), and
Sadock (1974), a schism had developed within the ranks of the mighty Generative
Paradigm. The advocates of this rebel movement, known as Generative Semantics,
challenged a fundamental postulate of the mainstream trend led by Chomsky him-
self (referred to as Interpretative Semantics). The bone of contention was the precise
status of semantics in grammar. While Chomsky and his followers held ®rmly to the
classic position that semantics could at best have a peripheral, interpretative role to
play, the young challengers were eager to prove that, quite on the contrary, semantic
considerations were right at the very epicentre of grammar. In fact, many of the
Young Turks were beginning to argue that the deep structure might, when all is said
and done, prove to be nothing but the very logical form of the sentence Ð an idea
that sat well with Searle's proposal to separate the performative clause from the
clause corresponding to the propositional content (the one where ordinary, truth-
conditional semantics could be claimed to operate). `Ìt is natural,'' wrote Lyons
(1977, p. 228), ``to consider the possibility of deriving all sentences from underlying
structures with an optionally deletable main clause containing a ®rst person subject,
a performative verb of saying, and optionally an indirect-object expression referring
to the addressee.'' What Lyons failed to mention Ð or probably thought not that
important to do so-was that the `naturalness' of the move was due to Searle's
replacement of Austin's locutionary acts by propositional acts (which correspond to
what the traditional grammarians called `noun clauses' Ð clauses that served as
objects of certain verbs of saying).
Viewing these developments in retrospect, Vendler (1967) was delighted to point
out that they had all been `prophetically' foreseen by Austin himself. To quote him:
``[...] one of the most fascinating aspects of Austin's work in these twin books is his
uncanny anticipation of later developments in linguistics'' (Vendler, 1967, p. 304). In
particular, Vendler went so far as to remark, Austin `ànticipated'' certain results of
generative grammar (p. 308). What is most remarkable about such anachronistic
claims of inspirational parenthood is that the Austin that was being claimed to have
òut-Chomskied' Chomsky by a few years was already an Austin that had been
passed through the Searlean interpretative sieve.10 To put it more bluntly, it was
10
To be fair to Vendler, it must be noted that he did draw attention to the fact that Austin was
somewhat unconventional as a philosopher. Thus he refers to Austin's ``peculiar sort of linguistics'' and
says: ``To put it bluntly, while other linguistic philosophers have had a thesis or at least a problem which
prompted them to gather some facts of language to support their position or `dissolve' their puzzles, with
Austin, at least at a later stage of his development, the thesis or the problem becomes secondary, and
theory often serves as occasion to explore some fascinating aspect of language for its own sake'' (Vendler,
1967, p. 304). Now, such a characterisation of Austin's personality is clearly at odds with Vendler's own
suggestion that he anticipated the work of generative linguists. The only plausible explanation I can think
of for this apparent anomaly is my claim that the Austin Vendler claims foresaw developments in gen-
erative linguistics is an Austin seen through Searle's interpretative lens.
Searle's re-interpretation of Austin's thoughts that was, from now on, being routi-
nely and anachronistically attributed to Austin himself.
A more revealing case in point is Sadock's treatment of Austin and Searle in his
book Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts (Sadock, 1974). In a section in the
introductory chapter of the book devoted to the basic notions relating to the theory
of speech acts, the author gives full credit to Austin and spells out the tripartite
distinction among the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary acts. In
the following section, entitled, `Formal linguistics and illocutionary acts', Sadock
goes on to trace the developments in grammatical research culminating in the
incorporation of illocutionary force into the underlying structure of a given sen-
tence. Sadock points out that the ®rst important step in the tradition set o by
Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957) was the work by Katz and Postal (1964) who
persuasively argued for the elimination of all meaning-changing transformations
and thus the need for rethinking such familiar rules of transformation as those that
yielded interrogative and imperative sentences from an underlying sentence in the
declarative mood. Instead of eecting a change of mood through syntactic trans-
formation, it was suggested that the mood be treated as speci®cally marked in the
deep structure of the sentence, so that, in the passage to the surface structure, no
meaning change would take place. `Ìn several respects,'' writes Sadock (1974, p. 14),
``Katz and Postal's scheme is an improvement over Chomsky's.'' With the publica-
tion of Ross's seminal paper Òn declarative sentences' (Ross, 1970), the so-called
àbstract performative hypothesis' had attained its most mature form and even the
declarative sentences that had until then been unproblematically treated as the basic,
default cases began to be seen as structurally more complex and having in their deep
structures a highest clause corresponding to the performative formula Ì arm that
etc.' (which was potentially subject to deletion, depending on whether or not the
sentence was ultimately going to be realised as an explicit performative). Ross's
paper was enthusiastically hailed by, among others, Davis (1976) who described it as
`òne way in which part of Austin's work might be integrated with linguistic theory''
(Davis, 1976, pp. 86±87).
What Sadock does not acknowledge or does not consider worth acknowledging is
the fact that the illocutionary act that he is invoking is not Austin's but Searle's Ð
for it is Searle who ®rst introduced into the theory of speech acts the idea that the
illocutionary force of a sentence may be considered in isolation from its proposi-
tional content. And it was Searle who introduced for the ®rst time the notation F (p)
Ð where the `F' stood for an Illocutionary Force Indicating Device and the `p' for
its propositional content. Of course, Sadock's claim went one step farther than
Searle's in that he was claiming (and indeed did so verbatim at the end of the
book) that ``[t]he illocutionary force of an uttered sentence is not distinct from
propositional acts, to use Searle's [...] term, nor from one sort of locutionary act,
to use Austin's term'' (Sadock, 1974, p. 147). (It is arguably the case that Sadock
uses Searle as a springboard but ends up espousing a thesis that, in the ®nal ana-
lysis, goes against one of Searle's principal tenets Ð a thesis argued for before him
by Cohen, 1969, p. 420 who found the concept of illocutionary force to be
èmpty').
Sadock's failure to mention Searle while giving full credit to an Austin that was
entirely Searle's recreation is by no means an isolated case in the vast literature on
the topic of speech acts in linguistics. Ross himself had signalled what was to
become the standard practice from then on-of attributing to the Oxford philosopher
views that can easily be shown to have resulted from Searle's in¯uential interpreta-
tion/appropriation of his thoughts. It is signi®cant that there is not a single mention
of Searle's name in Ross's (1970) 50-page-long paper. Instead, all the credit for the
insights relative to meaning and illocutionary force is given to Austin. As we have
already seen (cf. Section 7), however, the performative hypothesis derives its
strength from the twin principles of (a) the principle of expressibility and (b) the
possibility of sharply isolating the propositional act from the illocutionary act Ð
which are clearly Searle's and not Austin's.
If Sadock has full recourse to Searle's recreation of Austin while paying lip service
to the English philosopher, Gazdar, writing a handful of years later, does just the
opposite. Gazdar enthusiastically endorses Sadock's leading insights. Curiously
though, against ®ve explicit references to Searle, Austin gets only two passing
mentions Ð once, in a footnote (p. 15) and again in a quick reference, in the body of
the text, to Àustin's terminology'. By the end of the 1970s, one might argue, gen-
erative linguistics had all but swallowed up the theory of speech acts. This is most
evident in such con®dent remarks as the following by Lako (1972, p. 655): ``What
we have done is to largely, if not entirely, eliminate pragmatics, reducing it to garden
variety semantics.''
10. Searle's short-lived romance with linguistics
There is every reason to believe that, in the early 1970s at least, Searle was quite
happy with the reception his theory had in linguistics Ð the one discipline that was
at the pinnacle of glory in the hierarchy of disciplines in American universities
(measured both in terms of student enrolment and in terms of generous funding
from governmental and non-governmental agencies). ``The language connection is
not just a point of contact but a shared vested interest,'' as Harris (1996, p. xiv)
pithily put it in a dierent context-an observation which is nevertheless relevant to
the present discussion. In Searle's own enthusiastic words,
Indeed, in the way in which philosophical results tend to be assimilated to the

special sciences, the study of speech acts, one might say, is rapidly becoming a
branch of linguistics. The coalescence of these two trends is most visible in the
work of the generative semanticists, who reject Chomsky's separation of syntax
and semantics and attempt to do the study of syntax, using the theory of speech
acts as one of the bases (Searle, 1975a, p. 90).
The botanical metaphor of `branch' is explored further-alongside Love's (1999, p.

16) metaphor of `marriage', i.e. a bond never to be torn asunder except by the
Almighty Ð in Searle (1974, p. 30), where it is claimed there is an urgent need to graft
the theory of speech acts onto the body of theory already developed by the linguists.
In point of fact, Searle reverses the order of priorities, because he says it is the study
of language as carried out by the linguists that needed to be grafted onto the study
of speech acts Ð a sea-change indeed from the earlier characterisation of the speech
act theory as `à branch of linguistics''. In an in¯uential paper ®rst published in the
same year (but originally presented 4 years earlier), entitled À taxonomy of illocu-
tionary acts' Searle (1979b) is perfectly at ease with the idea that the speech act
potential should be latent in the syntactic component of grammar. Thus, after spel-
ling out his basic purpose, viz. to propose a taxonomy of speech acts dierent from
Austin's, Searle goes on to state:
Furthermore, since basic semantic dierences are likely to have syntactical

consequences, a third purpose of this paper is to show how these dierent basic
illocutionary types are realized in the syntax of a natural language such as
English (Searle, 1979b, p. 1).
Indeed, so great was Searle's enthusiasm for the idea of incorporating the funda-
mental insights of the speech act theory (as he had formulated it) into the then
fashionable model of syntax, that, towards the end of the paper, we ®nd him waxing
eloquent (and sounding indistinguishable from a professional linguist from Dwinelle
Hall, right across the Berkeley campus):
Since all of the sentences we will be considering will contain a performative verb
in the main clause, and a subordinate clause, I will abbreviate the usual tree
structures in the following fashion: The sentence, e.g., `Ì predict John will hit
Bill'', has the deep structure shown in Fig. 1. I will simply abbreviate this as; I
predict+John will hit Bill (Searle, 1979b, p. 20).
But it did not take Searle very long to come to the realisation that things were
slowly getting out of hand. Lako (1972)'s call for a `garden variety semantics' must
have rung the ®rst alarm bells, for what the generative semanticists were asking for
was a complete absorption of speech acts into a semantically informed syntax. As
Sadock was to point out in 1977, ``from the generative semantic point of view, illo-
cutionary force is an aspect of sentence meaning'' (Sadock, 1977, p. 67; cited in
Gazdar, 1979, p. 15). The reduction of speech acts to sentence-level semantics was
soon being hotly pursued by, among others, Hausser (1980), Lieb (1980) and
Auwera (1980). Many scholars such as Fodor (1977) and Auwera (1980) went so far
as to claim that the most basic speech acts are the ones that correspond to the four
basic syntactic moods, viz. the assertive, the interrogative, the imperative and the
optative. There were others like Wierzbicka (1980, 1985a, 1986), who were content
to approach illocutionary forces as complex semantic structures, which would have,
in some cases, simple syntactic structures corresponding to them, while in other
cases, the illocutionary force would lend itself to being decomposed into a number
of components (cf. Wierzbicka, 1980, p. 295).
In a scathing review of Sadock's 1974 book, Searle showed clear signs of having
taken an about-turn11 and lashed out at the attempts to incorporate speech acts into
the then available model of syntax. He wrote:
The contemporary inclination to pack all sorts of things into phrase-structure

trees even when they don't belong there does not arise simply from a fascination
with a new analytical tool, rather the formulation itself makes it necessary to
put this information in the trees because the notation provides no other way to
represent it (Searle, 1976, p. 967).
In his paper `Speech Acts and recent linguistics', Searle chose as prime targets of
his lambasting criticism Ross's paper Òn declarative sentences' (Ross, 1970) and
Gordon and Lako's `Conversational postulates' (Gordon and Lako, 1971). In a
passage marked by an unmistakable tinge of jealousy and fear that his brain-child Ð
the theory of speech acts Ð may no longer be in his own custody, Searle says:
Both of these theories seem to me to be mistaken explanations of the data

concerning speech acts, and both Ð though in their quite dierent ways Ð
make the same mistake of postulating a much too powerful explanation to
account for certain facts, when there already exists an independently motivated
theory of speech acts that will account for these facts (Searle, 1979b, p. 163, the
italics are mine).
And he goes on to conclude the paper saying:
The theory of speech acts is not an adjunct to our theory of language, some-
thing to be consigned to the realm of ``pragmatics'', or performance; rather, the
theory of speech acts will include all of what used to be called semantics as well
as pragmatics (Searle, 1979b, p. 178).
11. Disenchantment with the Searlean version of the speech act theory
Writes Duranti:
Austin's popularity is due to the work of the American philosopher John

Searle, who through his speech act theory made Austin's ideas accessible to a
wider audience including literary critics and psychologists [....] however, it is
11
This is not the only occasion when Searle has opted to beat a tactical retreat. The question as to
whether or not performatives are declarative sentences that are, in addition, used to perform speech acts
other than assertions is one to which Searle has provided dierent answers at dierent times (cf. Searle,
1989; also, Bach and Harnish, 1992). Searle has also appeared to vacillate between semantics (Searle,
1969) and pragmatics (Searle, 1986) in characterising his own theory of speech acts.
precisely Searle's accentuation of certain features of Austin's theory, such as

sincerity and intentionality, that have prompted the sharpest criticism of speech
act theory by linguistic anthropologists (Duranti, 1997, p. 218).
Incidentally, this passage bears yet another testimony to the vacillation typically
evinced by scholars as they try to assess the respective contributions of Austin and
Searle to what is vaguely referred to as the theory of speech acts. The ®rst part of the
passage leaves one with the impression that the speech act theory, properly speak-
ing, began with Searle (Austin's, by contrast, was at best a cluster of ideas, mostly
inaccessible). But then this impression is quickly laid to rest by the second part of
the passage, where not only is Austin credited with a theory of his own, but Searle's
contribution to it is characterised as that of highlighting certain of the features
already present in Austin's `proto-theory'. But, apart from this indecision, Duranti
rightly mentions the crucial fact that Searle's contribution is a critical intervention
into Austin's ideas and that not all criticisms directed at Searle automatically carry
over to Austin. This in itself, I believe, is a refreshingly novel perception, because, as
I have been at pains to stress all along, the commoner practice among text-book
writers is to treat the two as constituting a neat continuum or, to change the meta-
phor, as having done a relay race of theory-making. Particularly interesting is Dur-
anti's implied suggestion that not all changes introduced by Searle would have met
with Austin's approval had he had the chance to review them. Recalling Urmson's
(1967, p. 234) observation, one might hazard the guess that Austin would have
thought of some of Searle's bold innovations as at best attempts at ``premature
theorising''.
Perhaps nowhere else is the dierence between Austin and Searle more evident
than in the way they went about making generalisations. Against Austin's char-
acteristic habit of interrogating each case over and over again, of trying to tease out
dierent shades and nuances of meaning of single lexical items, of going back again
and again to what the man in the street would ordinarily say, Searle's approach
consisted in theorising from top down. In contrast to Austin who was an Aris-
totelian in spirit and method (Brown, 1962; Urmson, 1967; Rorty, 1967b; Cerf,
1969), Searle reveals himself to be an unrepentant Platonist to the hilt (cf. Baker and
Hacker, 1984, p. 65).
In Searle and Vanderveken (1985), we ®nd the idea of an illocutionary logic pre-
sented as the culmination of the project initiated in Searle (1969). The following
passage attests to the typical Platonic move from actuality to potentiality and
exclusive interest in the latter:
Illocutionary forces are realized in the syntax of actual natural languages in a

variety of ways, e.g., mood, punctuation, word-order, intonation contour, and
stress, among others; and it is a task for empirical linguistics to study such
devices as they function in actual linguistics. The task of illocutionary logic, on
the other hand, is to study the entire range of possible illocutionary forces
however these may be realized in particular natural languages. In principle it
studies all possible illocutionary forces of utterances in any possible language,
and not merely the actual realization of these possibilities in actual speech acts
in actual languages (Searle and Vanderveken, 1985, pp. 1±20).
Nowhere else does Searle's Platonism make itself more self-evident than in the
eagerness with which he looks around for universals in speech act theory. Thus,
against Austin's rough-and-ready classi®cation of the illocutionary acts into ®ve
somewhat fuzzy and overlapping categories,12 Searle (1975) oers a taxonomy that
yields 12 exhaustive types, arguing that ``[u]ltimately, I believe, essential conditions
form the best basis for a taxonomy'' (Searle, 1979b, p. 2). And he goes on to take
Austin to task for not having looked for such basic principles:
The most important weakness of [Austin's] taxonomy is this. There is no clear

or consistent principle or set of principles on the basis of which the taxonomy is
constructed (Searle, 1979b, p. 10).
Interestingly, Searle (1979c, p. 50) does recognise that there are important dier-
ences from one language to another (when it comes to, say the conditions under
which certain linguistic forms can be used to perform indirect speech acts), but is
quite happy to brush them aside as having to do with constraints of idiomaticity and
hence Ð by implication Ð factors that are merely accidental.
As a matter of fact, this unmistakably Platonic gesture of setting aside `marginal`
cases so as to concentrate on the more `central' ones (or, more appropriately, setting
aside as marginal all those cases that seem to threaten the general rule being proposed)
is evident from some of Searle's earliest writings on the topic of speech acts. Thus, dis-
cussing the necessary and sucient conditions for the making of a promise, he says:
There are all sorts of odd, deviant, and borderline promises; and counter-exam-
ples, more or less bizarre, can be produced against my analysis. I am inclined to
think we shall not be able to get a set of knock-down necessary and sucient
conditions that will exactly mirror the ordinary use of the word `promise'. I am
12
Despite Searle's remark that `Àustin advances his categories very tentatively, more as a basis for
discussion than as a set of established results'' (Searle, 1979b, p. 9), and despite Austin's own comment
that `Ì am not putting any of this forward as in the very least de®nitive'' (Austin, 1962, p. 151) which
Searle cites as evidence for his conclusion (Searle, 1979b), a case can be made that Austin was unsure of
ever coming up with neat and discrete categories. After observing that the notion of the purity of perfor-
matives has to be de®nitively abandoned, Austin goes on to arm: ``[...] this was essentially based upon a
belief in the dichotomy of performatives and constatives, which we see has to be abandoned in favour of
more general families of related and overlapping speech acts, which are just what we have now to attempt
to classify'' (Austin, 1962, p. 150). The emphasis on the word families is Austin's. The question that arises
then is: couldn't Austin have been using the word in the sense in which Wittgenstein had popularised it?
Although there is very little reason to believe that Wittgenstein could have in¯uenced Austin in any deci-
sive way, Pitcher (1973, p. 24) recalls Austin's frequent reference to the Philosophical Investigations and his
favourite remark ``Let's see what Witters has to say about that''. Against Searle's attempt at identifying
the essential conditions on the basis of which to classify speech acts, Reiss (1985) has pleaded for a looser,
heuristic approach. Searle's claim that his taxonomy is more economical than Austin's has been called
into question by, among others, Flowerdew (1990).
con®ning my discussion, therefore, to the centre of the concept of promising and

ignoring the fringe, borderline, and partially defective cases (Searle, 1971, p. 47).
In other words, whenever there is a mismatch between what theory predicts and
what practice delivers, to hell with what the people actually do with words. The issue
is taken up again in Searle (1969), where one reads:
In short, I am going to deal only with a simple and idealized case. This method,
one of constructing idealized models, is analogous to the sort of theory con-
struction that goes on in most sciences, e.g., the construction of economic
models, or accounts of the solar system which treat planets as points. Without
abstraction and idealization there is no systematization (Searle, 1969, p. 56).
The contrast here with Austin is clearly brought to the fore by Finlay (1988) in her
remark:
[....] Austin does dier from the logical atomists, the Port-Royalists, or for that
matter the Chomskyites, all of whom would rather state that there is a skeletal
ìdeal' language underlying everyday language (Finlay, 1988, p. 13).
To go back to Searle's quarrel with Austin over the latter's somewhat half-baked
attempt at classifying speech acts, among Searle's principal criticisms of Austin's
®ve-way classi®cation is the charge that Austin was systematically making a confusion
between illocutionary acts and illocutionary verbs. In what amounts to a complete
break with Austin and his insistence on a painstaking examination of the ordinary,
everyday words of the English language, Searle is saying here that it is not the word that
one must concentrate on, it is the abstract concept, the one that will lend itself to wider,
cross-linguistic, universal generalisations. Ironically enough, though, the very same
criticism was levelled against Searle's own attempt by subsequent writers (Holdcroft,
1978; Ballmer and Brenennstuhl, 1981; Edmondson, 1981; Leech, 1983; Tsui, 1987).
Notwithstanding such critiques, Searle's universalist approach was by now
already part of the received version of the speech act theory (which, in the form in
which it was available to the reading public was, as we have seen, largely the result
of Searle's decisive intervention) so that Clark and Schunk (1980, p. 111) could
con®dently proclaim that the tendency to use indirect means to make requests (such
as the use of an interrogative sentence for this purpose in English e.g. `Can you
please pass the salt?') was in fact a universal trait that cut across language bound-
aries and Fraser et al. (1980, p. 79) could equally con®dently assert that, when all is
said and done, the speakers of dierent languages do have at their disposal the same
set of speech act strategies to choose from.
But such overly complacent and sweeping claims, with hardly any empirical,
cross-linguistic data to prop them up, only helped reinforce the suspicion among
scholars, many of whom had an ethnomethodological orientation, that the speech
act theory in its Searlean guise had unwittingly fallen prey to the peril of ``premature
theorising'' and, worse still, had allowed the theory to be overrun by an ethnocentric
view of language (Silverstein, 1977). As Wierzbicka (1985b, p. 145) observes: ``From

the outset, studies in speech acts have suered from an astonishing ethnocentrism
and, to a considerable degree, they continue to do so''. Cicourel (1987, p. 660) notes
that Searle's abstract examples are at best a guide to ``the formal aspects of Anglo-
American culture'' and decrees with a tinge of irony: ``The philosopher of mind and
language, in Searle's work, becomes something of a formal anthropologist.''
The overriding ambition of Searle and his followers to universalise the theory of
speech acts and the underlying ethnocentric agenda were speci®cally targeted by
Rosaldo (1982). In the words of Duranti
For Searle and other speech act theorists, the goal is to produce a method for
arriving at the necessary and sucient conditions of human communication.
[...] For Rosaldo and other linguistic anthropologists, the goal is to understand
how particular uses of language might sustain, reproduce, or challenge parti-
cular versions of the social order and the notion of person (or self) that is part
of the order (Duranti, 1997, p. 228).
Rosaldo, Duranti and a number of other scholars who approached language from
an anthropological perspective were ultimately led to disillusionment with Searle's
rigid formalisation of the speech act theory and his single-minded quest for uni-
versals. Duranti sums up the growing disenchantment with Searle's theory in the
following words:
In particular, cultural anthropologists did not immediately realize that whereas

most of the examples discussed by Austin have to do with highly ritualistic and
institutionally de®ned speech acts such as naming a ship or marrying people,
Searle's extension of Austin's theory to a much wider range of acts constituted
a more general theory of human communication and human psychology [...].
As pointed out by a number of linguistic and cultural anthropologists, such a
theory seems at odds with an anthropological understanding of human action
and its interpretation in context (Duranti, 1997, pp. 227±228).
Scheglo (1992) spells out the dierence between Searle's philosophical approach
and his own sociological orientation by emphasising the role of context in the latter.
In his own words,
The shift to the empirical and the sociological from the conceptual and philo-
sophical underlies much in our exchange. For when we examine the details of
the actual talk of the actual people in interaction, we encounter the omnipresent
relevance of context, in various of the senses of that term, for sentient actors
(Scheglo, 1992, p. 125).
Scheglo admits that Searle is clearly aware of the importance of context but
thinks that in Searle's approach the whole idea of context emerges at best as an
afterthought. Says he,
There is, to my mind, no escaping the observation that context, which is most
proximately and consequentially temporal and sequential, is not like some
penthouse to be added after the structure of action has been built out of con-
stitutive intentional, logical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic/speech-act-
theoretic bricks (Scheglo, 1992, p. 125).
It is indeed ironic that Searle's èxtension' of Austin's `theory' should have been
set aside by anthropologically inclined linguists precisely on the grounds that it
overlooked cultural diversity in the name of wider, philosophically interesting gen-
eralisations. The following words by Austin himself from an early 1939 paper testify
to the enormous distance travelled by his disciple and self-styled exegete:
Neither Mr. Mackinnon nor Mr. Maclagan would claim, I think, to have told
us what they are talking about when they talk about `concepts'. Both seem,
however, to imply that the word `concept' could not be explained without using
the word ùniversal': and this seems also the common view, though how the two
are related is no doubt obscure and controversial. I propose, therefore, to make
some remarks about ùniversals': because I do not understand what they are, so
that it is most unlikely I shall understand what concepts are (Austin, 1961, p.
32).
And, as Furberg (1963, p. 28) argues, `Ìt is clear that the faults Austin ®nds with
concepts also aect propositions.''
12. Speech act theory and the search for origins
Cavell (1995, p. 44) remarks that Searle's Speech Acts ``has been and continues to
be far more in¯uential Ð in both literary studies and in philosophy Ð than Austin's
original work that invented the subject''. As I have been at pains to argue in this
paper, Cavell's observation is perhaps most appropriate to the reception of the
speech act theory in theoretical linguistics, where it is customary to come across
scholars who refer to Austin, often unmindful of the fact that the Austin they refer
to is actually Searle's extremely successful recreation of the late Oxford philosopher.
To judge by what may safely be regarded as a burgeoning trend, Cavell's remark
seems to be no longer true of philosophy itself. Three recently published dictionaries
of philosophy, viz. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Blackburn, 1994), The
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Audi, 1995), and The Penguin Dictionary of
Philosophy (Mautner, 1996) all carry separate entries on speech acts but none of
them even mentions the name of John Searle among those who have had a sig-
ni®cant role in the development of the theory (although many of the authors do
make a point of mentioning Hobbes, Brentano, Husserl, Anton Marty, Adolf
Reinach and others as possible precursors of Austin). The same is true of Flew's A
Dictionary of Philosophy (Flew, 1979). Lacey's A Dictionary of Philosophy (Lacey,
1976) does mention Searle's Speech Acts in the bibliography at the end of the entry
on speech acts, but the text of the entry itself shows no in¯uence of Searle's con-
tributions to the topic. [A brief comment in the Preface says: ``No single principle
underlies the bibliographies. An item may be the original source of a notion, or a
good, elementary, or accessible discussion, or a recent discussion from which pre-
vious ones can be traced, or a bibliographical source'' (p. vi).]
Cavell's remark is fully appropriate to the way the speech act theory has been
incorporated into contemporary linguistics. As we have already seen, in linguistics it
is Searle's reinterpretation of Austin that has held sway Ð notwithstanding, as we
have also seen, the recent disenchantment with the theory amongst those that follow
an ethnomethodological orientation. As for literary studies, Cavell's remark calls for
some quali®cation. It is probably true to say that literary theorists ®rst took notice
of Austin's thoughts thanks to Searle's popularisation of it. It is also true that some
of the early attempts such as the one by Pratt (1977) reveal strong in¯uence of
Searle's interventions into the speech act theory. By contrast, Petrey (1990) proposes
a speech act model for literary study based on Austin and ``like other scholars
working in the ®eld of pragmatic stylistics, considers Searle's idealisation of Austin's
ideas a retrograde step'' (Simpson, 1992, p. 370). [Although this is in sharp contrast
with Petrey's own remark, in a book published two years earlier, that Searle exten-
ded Austin's thoughts ``without violence'' (Petrey, 1988, p. 13).]
Limitations on space will not allow us to undertake a detailed survey of the
reception of Austin's ideas in literary studies. But, in general, these scholars have
tended towards a more textual approach to Austin's How to Do Things with Words
(cf. Rajagopalan, 1998, in preparation). Derrida's (1977a,b) deconstructive reading
of Austin has had an enormous impact on many of them. For Derrida, Austin's
book is best seen as a work which is ``patient, open, aporetical, in constant trans-
formation, often more faithful in the acknowledgement of its impasses than in its
positions'' (Derrida, 1977a, p. 187). Worthy of special mention in this context is
Felman's interesting discussion of the Austinian text (Felman, 1980) where she casts
Austin in the role of Don Juan, constantly seducing his readers and promising a
theoretical rounding up of his re¯ections, but only to leave things more muddled up
than before. Culler (1983, p. 118 fn) argues, however, that Felman is engaged in a
``sustained attempt to attribute to Austin everything she has learned from Derrida,
in order then to accuse Derrida of misreading Austin''. Other scholars have been
quick to point out that Derrida has a lot more in common with Austin than he is
willing to recognise. Fish argues: `Òne might say, with proper quali®cations, that
[Derrida] is a philosopher of ordinary language. In so saying, I am suggesting that
Derrida and Austin may not be so far apart as some have thought'' (Fish, 1982, p.
708). On the other hand, Stanley Cavell is of the opinion that Austin has been lar-
gely misinterpreted by both Searle and Derrida:
My own feeling is that while Derrida found Austin philosophically interesting,

even congenial, and Searle had found Austin useful and worth defending
against this treatment, neither really felt that Austin's is a philosophical voice
whose signature is dicult to assess and important to hear out in its dierence
(Cavell, 1995, p. 45).
13. Concluding remarks
The question of signature that Cavell addresses in the passage quoted above
makes a direct reference to Derrida's problematisation of the very idea of signature,
of what a signature is supposed to signify and to what extent it succeeds in guaran-
teeing its own success. In particular, Derrida calls attention to the ultimate irre-
concilability of the two requirements that (a) ``For the attachment to the source to
occur, the absolute singularity of an event of the signature and of a form of the
signature must be retained'' and (b) `Ìn order to function, that is, in order to be
legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to
detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production'' (Derrida,
1977, pp. 196±197). The idea of signature and the problematics of iterability it
unsuccessfully seeks to circumvent is a recurring theme in Derrida. It ®gures con-
spicuously in his trenchant rejoinder to Searle over Austin and also in Derrida
(1985) where one reads: `Ìt is rather paradoxical to think of an autobiography
whose signature is entrusted to the other, one who comes along so late and is so
unknown'' and further `Èvery text answers to this structure. It is the structure of
textuality in general. A text is signed only much later by the other'' (p. 51).
It is not dicult to see that this paper is, in the ®nal analysis, about texts and
signatures Ð the texts and signatures of Austin and Searle and indeed of the hun-
dreds of others who have been trying to assess exactly what it was that Austin was
trying to do with his words (and also what Searle has been, all these years, trying to
do with Austin). It also has to do with who has the right to speak on behalf of who
and under what circumstances. At a critical juncture in his reply to Derrida, Searle
remarks as follows:
Before beginning a discussion of Derrida's charge I should point out that I hold
no brief for the details of Austin's theory of speech acts. I have criticized it
elsewhere and will not repeat those criticisms here. The problem is rather that
Derrida's Austin is unrecognizable; he bears no relation to the original (Searle,
1977, p. 204, italics mine).
Searle is invoking his own hard-earned status as Austin's intellectual heir. As

Smith puts it,
Searle appears also, with an exaggerated jealousy, to want to eliminate Derrida

from coming anywhere near him or his work, and particularly anywhere near
the work of J. L. Austin whose legacy Searle believes himself to be the privi-
leged executor of [...] (Smith, 1995, p. 31).
Although Searle declares in as many words that he holds no brief for Austin, he is
adamant in claiming exclusive rights when it comes to interpreting what the Oxford
philosopher would have said had he not met with his untimely death in 1960. Thus,
referring to Derrida's observations on parasitism and Austin's diculties in addres-
sing the issue, Searle says,
Derrida seems to think that Austin's exclusion [of parasitic forms] is a matter of
great moment, a source of deep metaphysical diculties, and that the analysis
of parasitic discourse might create some insuperable diculties for the theory of
speech acts. But the history of the subject has proved otherwise. Once one has a
general theory of speech acts Ð a theory which Austin did not live long enough to
develop himself Ð it is one of the relatively simpler problems to analyze the status
of parasitic discourse, that is to meet the challenge contained in Derrida's ques-
tion: `What is the status of this parasitism?'. Writings subsequent to Austin's have
answered this question (Searle, 1977, p. 205, italics added).
Unsurprisingly, a footnote appended to the last sentence in the passage quoted

above directs the reader to Searle's own paper `The logical status of ®ctional discourse'
(Searle, 1979d). In other words, ``the history of the subject'' that he so con®dently
invokes is one which he himself inaugurated and is determined to defend at any cost.13
True to his words, Searle is not projecting himself as someone holding a brief for
Austin; he is saying that he is the person authorised to speak on behalf of Austin,
and that, as far as Derrida's objections go, he, Searle, is, to all intents and purposes,
an Àustin incarnate'. As Shaw (1990, p. 91) puts it: ``[..] Derrida's most telling
refutations of Austin/Searle refute words employed and copyrighted by Searle'' (ita-
lics added). Small wonder that Searle's reaction (cf. Searle, 1977) to what he saw as a
wanton act of provocation by Derrida was predictably packed with acerbities. He
was, after all, speaking on the strength of what he believed had become an indis-
putable fact, viz. his own status as the unchallenged custodian of the theory he had
so laboriously helped construct Ð as far as the theory of speech acts was concerned,
he was, he believed, monarch of all he surveyed and his right there was none to
dispute. In fact, so great is his con®dence in his own authority that, in the following
passage, we ®nd him unabashedly basking in the success of the theory and, even
assuming an air of false modesty by denying his own central role in the theory's
development and consolidation:
Systematic study of speech acts has now gone on for over 30 years. During that
time there has been genuine progress, and something like consensus has
emerged on many issues. Speech act theory has two features which would have
13
It goes without saying that what Derrida is doing is no less an act of claiming exclusive interpretative
rights over the Austinian text. As Scholes (1988, p. 284) has put it, ```Limited Inc.' is obviously a no-holds-
barred battle with Searle, but its predecessor `Signature Event Context' was a struggle for power and
position before Searle intervened at all: not merely a contest with Austin or with Jakobson but an argu-
ment over philosophical space.'' Derrida has been accused of gross misreading of Searle's text by Eco
(1986, p. 115) who writes: ``Focused as a new and unfaithful Torah, the text of Searle allows Derrida to
read in it something else, other than his adversary believed it to mean, and by and through which he in
fact has been meant.'' Also important to the present discussion is Rorty's insightful remark that if at all
there is any inconsistency in Derrida's acrimonious rebuttal (Derrida, 1977b), it has to do with his desire
to beat Searle at the latter's own favourite ball game. Says Rorty (1995, p. 462): ``That is why Derrida
looks bad whenever he attempts arguments on his opponents' turf; those are the passages in which he
becomes a patsy for John Searle.''
enormously pleased its founder, J. L. Austin, because he regarded them as

essential in fruitful intellectual work. First, it is possible for dierent people to
work on the theory. It is not the property of one person or of even one ideolo-
gical group. And second, agreement is possible. People of widely diering
ideologies and philosophical commitments can agree on the facts about pro-
mises, assertions, apologies, etc. (Searle, 1991, p. 81).
But Searle does give the game away because immediately following the above
remark he goes on to furnish us with some subtle indication as to where one should
look in order to locate the source of the consensus:
Among the items in the area of general agreement that I hope to take for
granted [...] are the following: there is a distinction between illocutionary forces
and propositional content so that, in general, speech acts have the structure
F(p). This distinction supersedes Austin's original distinction between illocu-
tionary acts and locutionary acts (Searle, 1991, p. 81).
In other words, Searle's theoretical foray into the theory of speech acts is itself an
enormous speech act (of asserting his own status as the standard bearer of the the-
ory), or a protracted speech event consisting of several such acts, each with its own
felicity conditions (and all the rest of the theoretical paraphernalia that Searle him-
self has proposed over the years). The success of the theory is to be credited, among
other things, to the historical circumstances in which Searle put it forward and the
alacrity with which he has cashed in on every opportunity, as and when it came
along, to maintain the hold on his own role as the theory's lynchpin. Ripeness was
all; but so too was, no doubt, Searle's readiness.
Searle's tactic is best understood in terms of Foucault's insightful observations in
his essay `What's an author?' (Foucault, 1979). Foucault makes the interesting point
that the authorial function has to do with the person who claims for herself the full
credit and responsibility for guaranteeing the unity and coherence of a certain dis-
course. The author is, furthermore, the one person who has given everybody to
understand that she has been àuthorised' by the discursive community in question
to act as the guarantor of that unity. As it happens, however, the unity claimed is
often more illusory than real. Rather than the authorial function emerging from the
unity of a particular discourse, it often turns out that it is the very appearance of
unity of that discourse that draws its sustenance from the authorial function, espe-
cially when it is deemed to be already ®lled in and under no immediate threat. But
the unity of the discourse (in our case, the discourse of speech act theory) and, along
with it, the authorial function that underwrites it, often come under heavy strain. As
we saw in Section 6, this is just what happened in the case of Wittgenstein: it was no
longer possible to insist on the putative unity spanning his entire philosophical
career, so the philosophical community hit upon the next best solution under the
circumstances which was to posit, not one, but two unities.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some commentators Ð acutely aware of the
tension discussed by Nigel Love (1999) in Searle's thought Ð have sought to portray
Searle as a philosopher divided against himself (Burkhardt, 1990; Harnish, 1990;

Liedtke, 1990; McDonough, 1990; Apel, 1991). The dividing line is usually believed
to be somewhere between Searle's earlier theory of speech acts (Searle, 1969, 1979)
and his later theory of intentionality (Searle, 1983). For Harnish, ``there are impor-
tant and irreconcilable dierences between these two works'' (Harnish, 1990, p.
170). McDonough is of the opinion that there is a systematic movement back and
forth in Searle's career, e.g. `à step forward, as in Searle's Speech Acts and, two
backwards, as in his Intentionality'' (McDonough, 1990, p. 264). Many think that, in
his earlier phase, Searle was a lot closer to Austin than in the later phase. In Love's
words, `Ìt is ironic that what started out as a development of Austin's theory of
speech acts should demonstrate so clearly the disastrous consequences of supposing
otherwise'' (Love, 1999, p. 24).
The fact remains, nevertheless, that, in spite of their growing numbers, such com-
plaints and critiques are still mostly cries in the wilderness and Searle's solid repu-
tation has remained untarnished by allegations of swapping theoretical horses in
mid-stream. Our primary aim in this paper was to unravel the mystery as to how
Searle has gone about the amazing task of living up to the ultimately irreconcilable
twin claims of (a) being a mouth-piece for Austin and (b) being an independent
philosopher holding `no brief for' his Oxford mentor. In light of our discussion, I
think there can be no doubt whatsoever that Searle has adroitly staked out Ð and,
from the looks of it, has been amply successful in maintaining Ð a solid reputation
for himself that rests on both simultaneously. He has been, in other words, amaz-
ingly successful at the incredible feat of eating the Austinian cake and having it
too.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento CientõÂ®co e TecnoloÂ-

gico (CNPq), a funding agency under Brazil's Ministry of Science and Technology,
for ®nancing my research (Process no. 306151/88-0). I am grateful to Ana Zandwais,
Carlos Gouveia, Carmen Zink Bolognini, Eric Sabinson, John Robert Schmitz, Olga
Rosemberg, Roberta Pires de Oliveira, and Viviane Veras for their valuable com-
ments on earlier versions of this paper.
References
Allan, K., 1998. Speech act theory Ð an overview. In: Mey, J.L. (Ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Prag-
matics. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 927±939.
Alston, W.P., 1964. Philosophy of Language. Prentice Hall, Englewood Clis, NJ.
Alston, W.P., 1971. How does one tell whether a word has one, several or many senses? In: Steinberg,
D.D., Jakobovits, L.A. (Eds.), 1991, pp. 35±47.
Alston, W.P., 1991. Searle on illocutionary acts. In: Lepore, E., Van Gulik, R. (Eds.), John Searle and His
Critics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 57±80.
Alston, W.P., 1994. Illocutionary acts and linguistic meaning. In: Tsohatzidis, S.L. (Ed.), Foundations of
Speech Act Theory. Routledge, London, pp. 29±49.
Apel, K.O., 1991. Is intentionality more basic than linguistic meaning? In: Lepore, E., Van Gullick, R.
(Eds.). Blackwell, Oxford.
Audi, R. (Ed.), 1995. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Austin, J.L., 1961a. Philosophical Papers. Oxford University Press, London.
Austin, J.L., 1961b. Are there a priori concepts? In: Austin, J. (Ed.), Philosophical Papers. Oxford Uni-
versity Press, London, pp. 32±54 (originally published in 1939).
Austin, J.L., 1961c. Pretending. In: Austin, J.L. (Ed.), Philosophical Papers. Oxford University Press,
London, pp. 253±271 (originally published in 1958).
Austin, J.L., 1962a. How to Do Things with Words. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Austin, J.L., 1962b. Sense and Sensibilia. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Austin, J.L., 1971. A plea for excuses. In: Lyas, C. (Ed.). Philosophy and Linguistics. The Macmillan
Press Ltd., London. pp. 79±101. (Originally published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
1956±1957; reprinted in Austin, J.L. Philosphical Papers. Oxford University Press, London. pp. 175±
204.)
Auwera, J., van Der, 1980. On the meaning of basic speech acts. Journal of Pragmatics 4, 253±264.
Bach, K., Harnish, R.M., 1992. How performatives really work: a reply to Searle. Linguistics and Philo-
sophy 15, 93±110.
Baker, G.P., Hacker, P.M.S., 1984. Language, Sense, and Nonsense. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Ballmer, T., Brenennstuhl, W., 1981. Speech Act Classi®cation. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Berlin, I. (1973). Austin: a personal memoir. In: Berlin, I. et al. (Eds.). pp. 1±17. Essays on J.L. Austin.
Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 1±17.
Bertolet, R., 1994. Are there indirect speech acts? In: Tsohatzidis, S.L., Foundations of Speech Act
Theory. Routledge, London, pp. 335±349.
Black, M., 1969. Austin on performatives. In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.). Symposium on J.L. Austin. Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London. pp. 401-411.
Blackburn, S., 1994. Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Bloor, D., 1976. Knowledge and Social Imagery. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Borsley, R.D., Newmeyer, F.J., 1997. The language muddle: Roy Harris and generative grammar. In:
Wolf, G., Love, N. (Eds.), Linguistics Inside Out: Roy Harris and His Critics. John Benjamins,
Amsterdam, pp. 42±64.
Brown, R., 1962. Review of Philosophical Papers and Sense and Sensibilia. Australasian Journal of Phi-
losophy 40, 347±365.
Burkhardt, A., 1990a. Introduction. In: Burkhardt, A. (Ed.), Speech Acts, Meaning and Intentions.
Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 1±26.
Burkhardt, A., 1990b. Speech act theory Ð the decline of a paradigm. In: Burkhardt, A. (Ed.), Speech
Acts, Meaning and Intentions. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 91±128.
Caton, C.E., 1971. Overview. In: Steinberg, D.D., Jakobovits, L.A (Eds.), Semantics: An Interdisciplinary
Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics, and Psychology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Cavell, S., 1958. Must we mean what we say? In: Lyas, C. (Ed.), Philosophy and Linguistics. The Mac-
millan Press Ltd., London, pp. 131±165 (originally published in Inquiry, 1).
Cavell, S., 1962. The availability of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In: Lyas, C. (Ed.), Pholosophy and
Linguistics. The Macmillan Press Ltd., London, pp. 166±189 (originally published in Philosophical
Review, 71).
Cavell, S., 1995. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Blackwell, Oxford, UK.
Cerf, W., 1969. Critical review of How to Do Things with Words. In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.), Symposium on
J.L. Austin. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. 351±380.
Chomsky, N., 1957. Syntactic Structures. Mouton, The Hague.
Chomsky, N., 1975. Re¯ections on Language. Pantheon Books, New York.
Chomsky, N., 1977. Language and Responsibility. Pantheon Books, New York.
Chomsky, N., 1980. Rules and Representations. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Cicourel, A.V., 1987. Review article on John R. Searle's Intentionality. Journal of Pragmatics 11, 641±660.
Clark, H.H., Schunk, D., 1980. Polite responses to polite requests. Cognition 8, 111±143.
Cohen, J.L., 1964. Do illocutionary forces exist? In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.), Symposium on J.L. Austin.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. 420±444.
Culler, J., 1983. On Deconstruction. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Danto, A., 1965. Nietzsche as a Philosopher. The Macmillan Co, New York.
Davis, S., 1976. Philosophy and Language. The Bobbs-Merrill Co, Inc, Indianapolis.
Derrida, J., 1977a. Signature event context. Glyph. 1, 172±197 (also in a dierent translation in: Derrida,
J., Margins of Philosophy. Chicago University Press, Chicago, pp. 307±329).
Derrida, J., 1977b. Limited Inc. abc ... Glyph. 2, 162±254.
Derrida, J., 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Derrida, J., 1985. The Ear of the Other. Schocken Books, New York.
Du Bois, J., 1993. Meaning without intention: lessons from divination. In: Hill, J., Irvine, J. (Eds.),
Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 48±71.
Ducrot, O., Todorov, T., 1982. DicionaÂrio das CieÃncias da Linguagem, Editora Dom Quixote, Lisbon.
Duranti, A., 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Eco, U., 1986. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
Edmondson, W., 1981. Spoken Discourse: a Model for Analysis. Longman, London.
Eemeren, F.H., van Grootendorst, R., 1984. Speech Acts in Argumentative Discourse. Dordrecht-Hol-
land, Amsterdam.
Falkenberg, G., 1990. Searle on sincerity. In: Burkhardt, A. (Ed.), Speech Acts, Meaning and Intentions.
Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. , pp. 129±145.
Felman, S., 1980. Le Scandale du corps parlant: Don Juan avec Austin ou La seÂduction en deux langues,
Seuil, Paris.
Fillmore, C.J., 1972. On generativity. In: Peters, S. (Ed.), Goals of Linguistic Theory. Prentice-Hall,
Englewood Clis, NJ, pp. 1±19.
Finlay, M., 1988. Deconstructing Austin's pragmatics: an idle teatable amusement (Russell) or epistemo-
logical solution to the crisis of representation? Semiotica 68, 7±31.
Fish, S., 1982. With compliments of the author: re¯ections on Austin and Derrida. Critical Inquiry 8, 693±722.
Flew, A., 1971. An Introduction to Western Philosophy. Thames & Hudson, London.
Flew, A., 1979. A Dictionary of Philosophy. Pan Books Ltd, London.
Flowerdew, J., 1990. Problems of speech act theory from an applied perspective. Language Learning 40,
79±105.
Fodor, J.D., 1977. Semantics: Theories of Meaning in Generative Grammar. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Fodor, J., Katz, J.J., 1963. The availability of what we say. In: Lyas, C. (Ed.), Philosophy and Linguistics.
The Macmillan Press Ltd., London, pp. 190±203 (originally published in Philosophical Review, 72).
Forguson, L.W., 1969a. Has Ayer vindicated the sense-datum theory? In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.), Symposium
on J.L. Austin. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. 309±341.
Forguson, L.W., 1969b. In pursuit of performatives. In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.), Symposium on J.L. Austin.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. 412±419.
Forrester, J., 1990. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Foucault, M., 1979. What's an author? In: Harari, J. (Ed.), Textual Strategies. Methuen, London, pp.
141±160.
Fraser, B., 1971. An examination of the performative analysis (mimeo), Indiana University Linguistics
Club, Indiana.
Fraser, B., 1974. Review of Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Foundations of Lan-
guage 11, 433±446.
Fraser, B., Rincet, B.L., Walters, M., 1980. An approach to conducting research on the acquisition of
pragmatic competence in second language. In: Larsen-Freeman, D. (Ed.), Discourse Analysis in Second
Language Research. Newbury House, Rowley, MA, pp. 79±93.
Fuller, S., 1993. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge. University of Wisconsin Press,
Madison.
Furberg, M., 1963. Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J.L. Austin's Philosophy. Basil Blackwell,
Oxford.
Gazdar, G., 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. Academic Press, New
York.
Gellner, E., 1959. Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London pp. xiii±xv.
Gordon, D., Lako, G., 1971. Conversational postulates. In: Papers from the 7th Regional Meeting.
Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago pp. 63±84.
Hampshire, S., Austin, J.L., 1967. In: Rorty, R. (Ed.), The Linguistic Turn. University of Illinois Press,
Illinois. pp. 239±248.
Hampshire, S., Austin J. L., 1969. 1911±1960. In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.), Symposium on J.L. Austin. Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London. pp. 33±46.
Hare, R.M., 1971. Philosophical discoveries. In Lyas, C. (Ed.), Philosophy and Linguistics. The Mac-
millan Press Ltd., London, pp. 223±240 (originally published in Mind 69, 1960).
Harnish, R.M., 1990. Speech acts and intentionality. In: Burkhardt, A. (Ed.), Speech Acts, Meaning and
Intentions. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 169±193.
Harris, R., 1981. The Language Myth. Duckworth, London.
Harris, R., 1996. The Language Connection. Thoemmes Press, Bristol, UK.
Hausser, R.R., 1980. Surface compositionality and illocutionary force. In: Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bier-
wisch, M. (Eds.), Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. D. Reidel, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 71±
96.
Hensen, R., 1971. What we say. In: Lyas, C. (Ed.), Philosophy and Linguistics. The Macmillan Press Ltd.,
London, pp. 204±222 (originally published in American Philosophical Quarterly, 2, 1965.
Holdcroft, D., 1978. Words and Deeds. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Holdcroft, D., 1994. Indirect speech acts and propositional content. In: Tsohatzidis, S.L. (Ed.), Foun-
dations of Speech act Theory. Routledge, London, pp. 350±364.
Katz, J.J., 1966. The Philosophy of Language. Harper & Row Publishers, New York.
Katz, J.J., 1977. Propositional Structure and Illocutionary Force. Hassocks, Sussex.
Katz, J.J., 1980. Literal meaning and logical theory. In: Burkhardt, A. (Ed.), Speech Acts, Meaning and
Intensions. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 229±258.
Katz, J.J., Postal, P.M., 1964. An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions. The MIT Press, Cam-
bridge, MA.
Kech, G., Stubbs, M., 1984. Koschmieder on speech act theory: a historical note. Journal of Pragmatics 8,
305±310.
Koller, A., 1970. Review of Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Language 46, 217±227.
Kuroda, S.-Y., 1986. A formal theory of speech acts. Linguistics and Philosophy 9, 495±524.
Lacey, A.R., 1976. A Dictionary of Philosophy. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Lacey, A.R., 1982. Modern Philosophy: An Introduction. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Lako, G., 1972. Linguistics and natural logic. In: Davidson, D., Harman, G. (Eds.), Semantics of
Natural Language. D. Reidel. Dordrecht, Holland, pp. 545±665.
Lako, G., 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Lamarque, P.V., 1998. Austin, John Langshaw. In: Mey, J.I. (Ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics.
Elsevier, London, pp. 1051.
Latour, B., 1987. Science in Action. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Leech, G., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. Longman, London.
Leonardi, P. and SbisaÁ, M. (1984). Introduction to Speech Acts after Speech Act Theory. (Special issue).
Journal of Pragmatics 8, 1±7
Levinson, S.C., 1982. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Lieb, H.H., 1980. Syntactic meanings. In: Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bierwisch, M. (Eds.), Speech Act
Theory and Pragmatics. D. Reidel. Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 121±154.
Liedtke, F.W., 1990. Representational semantics and illocutionary acts. In: Burkhardt, A. (Ed.), Speech
Acts, Meaning and Intentions. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 194±209.
Love, N., 1999. Searle on language. Language & Communication 19, 9±25.
LujaÂn Martinez, E.R., 1997. Pragmatics and Indo-European linguistics. Journal of Pragmatics 28, 189±
204.
Lyas, C. (Ed.), 1971. Philosophy and Linguistics. The Macmillan Press Ltd, London.
Lyons, J., 1977. Semantics. Vols. 1 and 2. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Mates, B. 1971. On the veri®cation of statements about ordinary language. In: Lyas, C. (Ed.), Philosophy and
Linguistics. The Macmillan Press Ltd., London. pp. 121±130 (originally published in Inquiry, 1, 1958).
Mautner, T. (Ed.), 1996. Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy. Penguin Books, London.
McCawley, J.D., 1971. Interpretive semantics meets Frankenstein. Foundations of Language 7, 285±296.
McDonough, R., 1990. The limits of enlightenment. Language & Communication 10, 255±265.
Meggle, G., 1985. To hell with speech act theory. In: Dascal, M. (Ed.), Dialogue: An Interdisciplinary
Approach. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 205±211.
Mey, J.L., 1993. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Mittwoch, A., 1976. Grammar and illocutionary force. Lingua 40, 21±42.
Moravcsik, J.M.E., 1967. Linguistic theory and the philosophy of language. Foundations of Language 3,
209±233.
Nerlich, B., Clarke, D.D., 1994. Language, action, and context: Linguistic pragmatics in Europe and
America (1800±1950). Journal of Pragmatics 22, 439±463.
New, C.G., 1971. A plea for linguistics. In: Lyas, C. (Ed.), Philosophy and Linguistics. The Macmillan
Press Ltd., London, pp. 102±120 (originally published in Mind, 75, 1966.
Pak, T., 1974. Searle's illocutionary fallacies. Semiotica 11, 145±188.
Passmore, J., 1957. A Hundred Years of Philosophy. Duckworth, London.
Pears, D., 1969. An original philosopher. In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.), Symposium on J.L. Austin. Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, pp. 49±58.
Petrey, S., 1988. Realism and Revolution. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Petrey, S., 1990. Speech Acts and Literary Theory. Routledge, London.
Pitcher, G., 1973. Austin: a personal memoir. In: Berlin, I. et al. (Eds.), Essays on J.L. Austin. Clarendon
Press, Oxford, pp. 1±17, pp. 17±30.
Pratt, M.L., 1977. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, IN.
Price, H., 1994. Semantic minimalism and Frege point. In: Tsohatzidis, S.L. (Ed.), Foundations of Speech
act Theory. Routledge, London, pp. 32±155.
Rajagopalan, K., 1998. Between Marx and Derrida: an exercise in literary semantics. Journal of Literary
Semantics 27, 72±95.
Rajagopalan, K. (in preparation). Austin's humorous style of philosophical discourse in light of
Schrempp's interpretation of Oring's ìncongruity theory' of humor. Humor: An International Journal
of Humor Research.
Reiss, N., 1985. Speech Act Taxonomy as a Tool for Ethnographic Description: An Analysis Based on
Videotapes of Continuous Behavior in Two New York Households. Pragmatics and Beyond, Vol. VI.
John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Richards, B., 1971. Searle on meaning and speech acts. Foundations of Language 7, 519±538.
Rolf, E., 1990. On the concept of action in illocutionary logic. In: Burkhardt, A. (Ed.), Speech Acts,
Meaning and Intentions. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 147±165.
Rorty, R., 1967b. Introduction. In: Rorty, R. (Ed.), The Linguistic Turn. University of Illinois Press,
Illinois, pp. 1±39.
Rorty, R., 1995. Pragmatism and literary theory: philosophy without principles. Critical Inquiry 11, 459±
465.
Rosaldo, M.Z., 1982. The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory. Language
in Society 11, 203±237.
Ross, J.R., 1970. On declarative sentences. In: Jacobs, R.A., Rosenbaum, P.S. (Eds.), Readings in English
Transformational Grammar. Ginn and Co, Waltham, MS, pp. 222±272.
Russell, B., 1959. Foreword. Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic
Philosophy. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. xiii±xv.
Russell, B., 1961. Introduction. In: Wittgenstein (Ed.), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, pp. ix±xxii.
Ryle, G., 1949. An appeal to language. In Lyas, C. (Ed.), Philosophy and Linguistics. The Macmillan
Press Ltd., London, pp. 39±44 (originally published in Ryle, G., 1949. The Concept of Mind. Hutch-
inson, London).
Sadock, J., 1974. Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York.
Sadock, J., 1977. Aspects of linguistic pragmatics. In: Rogers et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Texas
Conference on Performatives, Presuppositions, and Implicatures. Center for Apllied Linguistics,
Arlington, VA, pp. 67±78.
SbisaÁ, M., 1984. On illocutionary types. Journal of Pragmatics 8, 93±112.
Scheglo, E., 1992. To Searle on conversation: a note in return. In: Searle, J.R. et al. (Eds.), (On) Searle
on Conversation. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, pp. 113±128.
Scholes, R., 1988. Deconstruction and communication. Critical Inquiry 14, 278±295.
Searle, J.R., 1965. What is a speech act? In: Searle, J. R. (Ed.), The Philosophy of Language. OUP,
Oxford, pp. 39±53 (originally published in Black, M. (Ed.), Philosophy in America. Allen & Unwin,
London, 1965, pp. 221±239).
Searle, J.R., 1966. Review of M. Furburg's Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts: A Main Theme in J. I.
Austin's Philosophy. Philosophical Review 75, 389±391.
Searle, J.R., 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK.
Searle, J.R., 1973. Austin on locutionary and illocutionary acts. In Berlin, I. et al. (Eds.), Essays on
J.L. Austin. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 141±185 (originally published in Philosophical Review 77,
1968).
Searle, J.R., 1974. Chomsky's revolution in linguistics. In: Harman, G. (Ed.), On Noam Chomsky:
Critical Essays. Doubleday, New York. pp. 2±33 (originally published in: New York Review of Books,
vol. 17, 1972).
Searle, J.R., 1975. Linguistics and the philosophy of language. In Bartsch, R. and Vennemann, T. (Eds.),
Linguistics and Neighboring Disciplines. North-Holland, Amsterdam (orriginally published in 1973),
pp. 89±100 (originally published in German under the title Linguistik und Nachbarwissenschaften,
Scriptor Verlag GambH & Co.).
Searle, J.R., 1976. Review of Sadock's Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts. Language 52, 966±
971.
Searle, J.R., 1977. Reiterating the dierences. Glyph 1, 198±208.
Searle, J.R., 1979a. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Searle, J.R., 1979b. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In Searle, J. R. (Ed.), pp. 1±29 (®rst published
in Gunderson, K. (Ed.), Language, Mind, and Knowledge: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, Vol. VII. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1975).
Searle, J.R., 1979c. Indirect speech acts. In Searle, J.R. (Ed.), pp. 1±30 (originally published in Cole, P.
and Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3. Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York, 1975,
pp. 59±82.
Searle, J.R., 1979d. The logical status of ®ctional discourse. In: Searle, J.R. (Ed.), pp. 58±75.
Searle, J.R., 1979e. Speech acts and recent linguistics. In: Searle, J.R. (Ed.), pp. 162±179.
Searle, J.R., 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Searle, J.R., 1986. Meaning, communication, and representation. In: Grandy, R.E., Warner, R. (Eds.),
Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 209±
229.
Searle, J.R., 1989. How performatives work. Linguistics and Philosophy 12, 535±558.
Searle, J.R., 1990. The storm over the university. The New York Review of Books 37, 34±42.
Searle, J.R., 1991. Response: meaning, intentionality and speech acts. In: Lepore, E., Gulik, R. (Eds.),
John Searle and His Critics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 81±102.
Searle, J.R., 1993. Rationality and realism: what is at stake. Daedalus 93, 55±83.
Searle, J.R., 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. Penguin, London.
Searle, J. R., 1997. A philosophical self-portrait. In: Mautner, T. (Ed), Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy.
Penguin Books, London, pp. 512±514.
Searle, J.R., Vanderveken, D., 1985. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bierwisch, M., 1980. Introduction. In: Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bierwisch, M.
(Eds.), Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. D. Reidel, Dordrecht-Holland, pp. vii±xii.
Shaw, H.E., 1990. With reference to Austin. Diacritics 20, 75±92.
Silverman, T., 1980. The Material Word. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Silverstein, M., 1977. Cultural prerequisites to grammatical analysis. In: Saville-Troike, M. (Ed.), Lin-
guistics and Anthropology: Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1977.
Georgetown University Press, Washington DC, pp. 139±151.
Simpson, P., 1992. Review of Petrey (1990). Journal of Pragmatics 17, 369±372.
Smith, B., 1990. Toward a history of speech act theory. In: Burkhardt, A. (Ed.), Speech Acts, Meaning
and Intentions. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. pp, 29±, pp. 61±.
Smith, N.V., 1983. Speculative Linguistics: An Inaugural Lecture. University College, London.
Smith, N.V., 1999. Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Smith, R., 1995. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Stoutland, F., 1989. On not being a realist. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Aristotelian
Society 1988/1989, pp. 95±111.
Strawson, P.F., 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts. In: Strawson, P.F. (Ed.), Logico-Linguistic
Papers. Methuen & Co. Ltd, London, pp. 149±169.
Strawson, P.F., 1971. Meaning and truth. In: Strawson, P.F. (Ed.), Logico-Linguistic Papers. Methuen &
Co. Ltd, London, pp. 170±189.
Taylor, T.J., 1981. A Wittgensteinian perspective in linguistics. Language & Communication 1, 263±274.
Thomas, J., 1995. Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction. Longman, London.
Tsui, A., 1987. Aspects of the classi®cation of illocutionary acts and the notion of the perlocutionary act.
Semiotica 66, 359±377.
Urmson, J., Austin, O. J. L., 1967. In: Rorty, R., (Ed.), The Linguistic Turn. University of Illinois Press,
Illinois, pp. 232±238.
Urmson, J.O., 1969. Austin's philosophy. In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.), Symposium on J.L. Austin. Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, pp. 22±32.
Vanderveken, D., 1990. Meaning and Speech Acts: Principles of Language Use. Vol. 1. Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge.
Vanderveken, D., 1994. A complete formulation of a simple logic of elementary illocutionary acts. In:
Tsohatzidis, S.L. (Ed.), Foundations of Speech Act Theory. Routledge, London, pp. 99±131.
Van Rees, M.A., 1992. The adequacy of speech act theory for explaining conversational phenomena. A
response to some conversation analytical critic. Journal of Pragmatics 17, 31±47.
Vendler, Z., 1967. Review of Austin's Sense and Sensibilia and How to Do Things with Words. Foun-
dations of Language 3, 303±310.
Vendler, Z. 1971. Summary: linguistics and the a priori. In Lyas, C. (Ed.), pp. 245±265 (originally pub-
lished in Vendler, Z. (Ed.), Linguistics in Philosophy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1967).
Warnock, G.J., 1969. John Langshaw Austin, a biographical sketch. In: Fann, K.T. (Ed.), Symposium on
J.L. Austin. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. 3±22.
Warnock, G.J., 1973. Saturday mornings. In: Berlin, I. et al. (Eds.), Symposium on J.L. Austin. Routlegde
& Kegan Paul, London, pp. 31±45.
Warnock, G.J., 1988. J.L. Austin. Routledge, London.
Widdowson, H.G., 1989. Knowledge of language and ability for use. Applied Linguistics 10, 128±137.
Wierzbicka, A., 1980. Lingua Mentalis. Academic Press, New York.
Wierzbicka, A., 1985a. A semantic metalanguage for a cross-cultural comparison of speech acts and
speech genres. Language in Society 14, 491±514.
Wierzbicka, A., 1985b. Dierent cultures, dierent languages, dierent speech acts: Polish vs. English.
Journal of Pragmatics 9, 145±178.
Wierzbicka, A., 1986. A semantic metalanguage for the description and comparison of illocutionary
meanings. Journal of Pragmatics 10, 67±107.
Wittgenstein, L., 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London (originally
published in 1922).
Wittgenstein, L., 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Basil Blackwell, Oxford (originally published in
1995).
Wolf, G., 1999. Editorial introduction. Language & Communication 19, 1±8.
Woolgar, S. (Ed.), 1988. Knowledge and Re¯exivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge. Sage
Publications, Beverly Hills, CA.
Wunderlich, D., 1980. Methodological remarks on speech act theory. In Searle, J.R. et al. (Eds.), pp. 291±
312.
Yule, G., 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

On Searle (On Austin) On Language: Kanavillil Rajagopalan

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

On Searle (On Austin) On Language: Kanavillil Rajagopalan

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Language & Communication 20 (2000) 347±391

On Searle [on Austin] on language

E-mail address: rajan@panini.iel.unicamp.br (K. Rajagopalan).

Nevertheless, on other occasions, Searle adopts a tactic that is sharply critical of

At the heart of Chomsky's linguistics is the notion of I-language, a term which

There is no reason to believe [.....] that language `essentially' serves instrumental

I can be using language in the strictest sense with no intention of communicat-

nevertheless my intentions with regard to an audience may shed no light on this

A struggle on what seems to be such a central issue in philosophy should have

Searle's marriage of an early-Chomskyan linguistics to his own version of an

[Integrationism] may be initially characterized by the view that sign-makers

3. Some preliminary considerations

Before we proceed any further, it is important to draw the readers' attention to a

4. The two theses

chosen disciple (whether a torso is necessarily incomplete and in need of completion

contributed to it signi®cantly, extending it in ways (for all we know) not imagined by

5. The importance of keeping the two theses distinct

6. Three strategies of containment

contemporaries was to dismiss him as an `outsider' to philosophy. This was often

Nietzsche was unceremoniously ostracised. In Wittgenstein's case, the philosophical

later philosophy on linguistics: ``Indeed, even J. L. Austin Ð often grouped with

7. The king is dead; long live the king

to the philosophical establishment in the US which was forced to undertake urgent

7.1. The election of Searle as the heir apparent

solemn; on the contrary, they were continuously enjoyable and amusing Ð

Moravcsik (1967) draws our attention to Austin's persistently nonchalant

The Socratic kind of self-questioning whether practiced by Socrates or Ð in our

debunker of received wisdom who revelled in philosophical debauchery to the det-

This distinction, in various forms, is by now common in philosophy and can be

7.2. The coronation and consolidation of power

8. Bowdlerisation of Austin at Searle's hands and its timeliness

Searle's adherence to orthodox realism is in sharp contrast with Austin's own

Whatever doubts may be entertained about Austin's notions of meaning and of

Strawson's claim, later on worked by Searle into an article of faith, is that, in

9. Speech act theory and generative linguistics

It was to be expected that a certain kind of philosopher would be tempted to

10. Searle's short-lived romance with linguistics

Indeed, in the way in which philosophical results tend to be assimilated to the

The botanical metaphor of `branch' is explored further-alongside Love's (1999, p.

Furthermore, since basic semantic dierences are likely to have syntactical

The contemporary inclination to pack all sorts of things into phrase-structure

Both of these theories seem to me to be mistaken explanations of the data

And he goes on to conclude the paper saying:

Austin's popularity is due to the work of the American philosopher John

precisely Searle's accentuation of certain features of Austin's theory, such as

Illocutionary forces are realized in the syntax of actual natural languages in a

The most important weakness of [Austin's] taxonomy is this. There is no clear

con®ning my discussion, therefore, to the centre of the concept of promising and

view of language (Silverstein, 1977). As Wierzbicka (1985b, p. 145) observes: ``From

In particular, cultural anthropologists did not immediately realize that whereas

12. Speech act theory and the search for origins

My own feeling is that while Derrida found Austin philosophically interesting,

13. Concluding remarks

Searle is invoking his own hard-earned status as Austin's intellectual heir. As

Searle appears also, with an exaggerated jealousy, to want to eliminate Derrida

Unsurprisingly, a footnote appended to the last sentence in the passage quoted

enormously pleased its founder, J. L. Austin, because he regarded them as

Searle as a philosopher divided against himself (Burkhardt, 1990; Harnish, 1990;

I wish to thank the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento CientõÂ®co e TecnoloÂ-

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

Furthermore, since basic semantic dierences are likely to have syntactical